


Our Hearts Are Analog

by earthinmywindow



Series: Dream Runners [8]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Multi, Warm and Fuzzy Feelings, people coming to terms with things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-19
Updated: 2014-07-19
Packaged: 2018-02-09 13:28:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1984710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earthinmywindow/pseuds/earthinmywindow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After three and a half years on the run with Reiner and Annie, Bertolt has turned himself in for the crime he did indeed commit, so the two people he loves can finally be free, return home and live normal lives. But can they really lead ordinary lives after all they've been through? Bertolt is prepared to take his punishment and Reiner and Annie have vowed to wait for him, but time—especially time apart—has a way of changing people. And Happily Ever Afters have rarely come easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Hearts Are Analog

**Author's Note:**

> Well folks, here it is. The last installment. I'm saving the real notes for the end and here I will merely put the dedication. This is for Carlile, who had to put up with my writing frustrations more than anyone else and did so with aplomb.

_“Reiner. My Reiner. You are mine, Reiner. Always. I will never let him have you for as long as I live. You belong to me. Always. My precious Reiner Braun.”_   
  
_The voice was a paradox, warmly familiar and yet thrillingly new. No face to go with it, just ripples of light and shadow._   
  
_“So you really are set on him being a Braun, eh? It’s a lovely name, I have to admit. My favorite person in the world—well, now my two favorite people in the world—are Brauns.”_   
  
_This voice, lower, was as simultaneously comforting and exciting as the first._   
  
_“What can I say? We Brauns are a lovable lot,” said the first voice._   
  
_The second voice chuckled. “I’m not going to argue with that. I was just thinking, well—I was thinking the two of you would make great Leonharts.” There was a nervous pause. “Is that something you’d be interested in?”_   
  
_“Auggie, are you asking what I think you are?”_   
  
_“It’s not really about names, if that’s what you mean, Nessa. You know I don’t care if you stay a Braun forever. I just want you to be with me forever. I want to marry you, Vanessa Braun. And I want to adopt Reiner. I already think of him as my son, but I want to make it official. Huh? Are you crying?”_   
  
_“I promise, this is the good kind of crying. And the answer is yes. Yes, I want to marry you, August Leonhart. I want Reiner to be your son.”_   
  
_“Ah man, now I’m crying, too. See what you’ve done to me Nessa? Next thing you know, little guy will start wailing in celebration. Thank you. Thank you for being my family. I’m so happy right now, all I can say is—”_

  
  
“Wake me up before you go-go; don’t leave me hangin’ on like a yo-yo!  
Wake me up before you go-go; I don’t wanna miss it when you hit that high!”  
  
Reiner awoke with a jolting gasp, eyes bursting open on a bedroom still dark except for the screen of his iPhone, which glowed on his nightstand as the ringtone continued to play.  
  
“Wake me up before you go-go; ‘cause I’m not plannin’ on going solo!  
Wake me up before you go-go; take me dancing tonight!”  
  
“Calm down, I’m coming,” Reiner muttered to the phone, as if it could hear him. When he reached for it, though, his sleep clumsy hand knocked it to the floor where it kept on singing obnoxiously. Who was calling before the sun rose anyway? But then he was the one who kept his phone on, so in a sense he was asking to be bothered.  
  
“Hello,” he said groggily upon retrieving the phone and swiping his thumb across the screen to answer.  
  
A gruff, unfamiliar man’s voice spoke on the other end. “Is this Reiner Leonhart?”  
  
“I go by Braun these days, but yes, legally I am still Reiner Leonhart.” It was more information than he really needed to give, but that tended to happen when his brain wasn’t quite free from the clutches of sleep. “Who is this?”  
  
“My name is Nile Dawk. I’m the Director of Stohess Correctional Facility.”  
  
This made Reiner sit up in bed, instantly attentive. “Yes?”  
  
“I’m calling about Bertolt Vincent Hoover,” said Dawk, which Reiner had already figured. “You are listed in his file as the point of contact for his release.”  
  
That word— _release_ —left Reiner breathless, but he still managed a thin, “Yes?” He took the role of listener for most of the ensuing conversation, responding simply when required. “Yes. Uh-huh. Yes. I understand. That’s right. I’ll be there. Have a good day.”  
  
When the call ended, a few minutes before five, Reiner felt more awake than he had in many months. His heart was racing with anticipation; it was a good thing he had to get on the road early because he didn’t think he could bear to just sit around waiting. He’d have to call in sick to work for the first time since since starting his job over a year ago.  
  
Reiner changed into his clothes for the day, obsessing over his choices—was it red or blue that Bertolt said looked best on him?—and headed downstairs to make a pot of coffee. Even if he didn’t think he needed it right now, fatigue might catch up to him during the drive and so it wouldn’t be a bad idea to bring a thermos. Better than stopping at Starbucks—not because he didn’t want to shell out the exorbitant cash, but because he didn’t want any unnecessary delays.  
  
Right now he felt like he could sprout wings and fly down to Richmond, but then how would he bring Bertolt home? He had to calm down. Was coffee really the thing? He might have seriously considered skipping the caffeine if the scent of roasted beans hadn’t flooded his nostrils the moment he stepped inside the kitchen. The bubbly bong-hit slurp told him the machine was still brewing and that meant that Mom must be—  
  
“Morning, Reiner,” she said, plucking two just-popped slices of bread from the toaster and setting them on a plate. “You’re up early today. Starting a new project on a major road?”  
  
“Uh, no,” said Reiner, blinking, inexplicably dazed. He knew that Mom got up this early to make the long commute from Loudoun County into D.C., so he wasn’t surprised to see her in the kitchen. No, it was something about the sound of her voice that struck him, and what it triggered was more deja vu than shock. “Hey Mom, I think you were in a dream I had last night.”  
  
Mom was standing next to the kitchen counter, scraping butter over her toast as she waited on the coffee. She was still clad in her fluffy pink bathrobe, mussy-haired and morning-blurry, but her eyes, when she turned them on Reiner, were remarkably sharp. “A dream, eh? And that's why you’re up and dressed at this hour? Is everything okay at work?”  
  
Here Reiner would choose his words carefully since he wasn’t sure how Mom would react to the news. “Actually, I’m going to be calling in sick today.” He watched her back straighten, her eyes widen—he never called in sick so her alarm was understandable. “Mom, I got a call from Stohess. They're letting him out a few weeks early. And by early, I mean today.”  
  
“Oh,” said Mom, her mouth as round as her eyes. “So then I guess you’ll be driving down to get him?”  
  
“That’s right,” said Reiner. “You, uh, haven’t changed your mind about him moving in here, have you?” They’d barely discussed the decision since they’d made it, immediately after the sentencing, and though they’d reserved a bedroom in the new townhouse explicitly for Bertolt’s use, Reiner was still anxious as he awaited Mom’s answer now.  
  
She smiled reassuringly at him and said, “No, I haven’t changed my mind. I just didn’t know they were going to contact you first. You know, since Lynne is the one who’s been visiting him. I thought perhaps _he’d_ changed _his_ mind.”  
  
The percolations had stopped. Sighing, Reiner opened the cupboard and fetched two mugs. “If it had been up to me,” he said as he poured coffee for two, “I would’ve gone to see him every chance I got. But Annie and I had to respect his wishes for us to carry on without him. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he’s been working on patching things up with his mom, but I’m relieved that he’ll be coming home to us.”  
  
“Nervous?” Mom asked, cocking an eyebrow.  
  
“Yeah,” Reiner admitted. He’d grabbed the milk from the fridge and administered a generous dollop to his mug before taking a sip. “We haven’t talked or even seen each other in eighteen months. And he’s been in prison—medium security, yeah, but it’s still prison and I have no idea how it’s affected him.”  
  
Mom set down her mug and moved in to hug her son, who had about ten inches and ninety pounds on her but who she still treated like her little boy. “It’s going to be okay, Reiner. We’ll all do our best to make him feel at home.” She went quiet and took a step back, looking up at him questioningly. “What about Annie? Will she be accompanying you?”  
  
“I didn’t wake her,” said Reiner. “She was up late last night, thought it would be better to let her sleep. Besides, doesn’t she have a class today?”  
  
“Not until this evening.” Mom pursed her lips, like she was thinking some criticism she chose not to say. “Are you going to leave a note for her? Call from road? Or should I tell her?”  
  
Reiner grinned. “Actually, I was thinking I’d surprise her. So don’t drop any hints, okay?”  
  
“If you really think that’s a good idea,” Mom said, fixing him with a skeptical look that was undeniably Annie-ish. “I won’t say a word. But I'm not going to take responsibility for anything she might do to you in retaliation for keeping this from her.”  
  
“Oh, she’ll be too thrilled to see Bertolt to take action against me,” said Reiner.  
  
Mom shrugged and took another drag of her coffee. “I just thought she’d appreciate a heads up to prepare herself to face him. But, like I said, I won’t say a word.”  
  
“Thanks, Mom,” he said, kissing her cheek. Then he went about hunting for his thermos and something quick for breakfast, tremulously eager to be on his way.  
  
After years of faithful service, the old blue Toyota had finally died last year, it’s motor giving out as suddenly and irreparably as if it had suffered a massive coronary. Now Reiner drove the latest hand-me-down from Mom, a silver Subaru. It was a reliable vehicle and had a jack to connect to an iPod, which he was eminently grateful for with a two-and-a-half hour drive ahead of him, even though he knew music wouldn’t really make the trip go faster. At least the traffic was still pretty light at this early hour.  
  
Reiner plugged in his iPod and set it to shuffle mode before pulling out of the driveway and heading towards I-95, the road that would take him to Bertolt Hoover.  
  
When he was settled in the cruising lane of the Interstate, the orange sunrise warming the right side of his face and promising a clear March day, Reiner’s thoughts bounded back and forth between the past and the future, the hearing and the impending reunion. And amidst this mental ricochet, the dream he’d been having when the phone woke him kept asserting itself at the forefront of his mind.  
  
He remembered the dream with far more clarity than he expected considering how distracted he’d been upon waking. But for whatever reason—perhaps because it had been so vivid—it had stuck with him. The predominantly auditory dream was of an exchange between Mom and Dad that took place while he was just a newborn infant, and it had played out in his brain as precisely as if he’d actually experienced it. Well, he had actually experienced it, but he’d been less than a day old so it was unrealistic to reckon he’d drawn it from his own memory. His subconscious brain must have reconstructed it from Mom’s account.  
  
  
The conversation had happened very soon after Reiner and Annie returned to their mother’s home, in the short but tumultuous stretch before Bertolt's hearing when everyone was emotionally frayed and unsettled. Reiner had been the biggest mess then, or at least the most openly distraught—Annie’s more skillfully suppressed anguish would break to the surface later—and he’d needed a satisfying answer to something in his life just to keep him from having a complete breakdown. But while his fragile condition had induced him to ask Mom directly about his paternity, he wouldn’t have been able to do it if she hadn’t welcomed them with unmitigated love and support.  
  
Having learned a vital lesson from the ordeal that arose because he, Annie, and Bertolt kept things from each other, Reiner decided he was done with holding onto secrets. At the earliest opportunity he saw—which was the car ride from Dulles Airport after Mom had come to collect her long lost children—he and Annie had told her essentially everything that happened to them in the forty months they’d been gone. And Mom had listened. Mom had listened and she hadn’t judged or scolded them; not for running away or for him being gay or for Annie having gotten pregnant or for both of them being in love with the man who accidentally killed their mother’s boyfriend. Mom was just so happy to have her babies back safely and she couldn’t stop crying.  
  
It was past midnight (Eastern Standard Time) when they arrived at the apartment in Arlington, the place where he and Annie had grown up, now eerie and dreamlike in all its strange familiarity. Reiner wouldn’t have been able to sleep even if they hadn’t crossed timezones, and Mom seemed to know this intuitively as she set herself to heating up milk for hot chocolate almost as soon as they were all inside. Then she and Reiner sat down on the couch together, clutching their warm mugs, and he proceeded to fill in any details missing from the account he gave in the car. Though Annie had previously made contributions to the tale, once they were in the apartment she fell into a mute trance, drifting around the well-known environment like the future ghost of her younger self.  
  
Exactly how Reiner had met his boyfriend Marcel was perhaps the only question Mom didn’t ask, but everything else got covered, from the underground fight club to fake IDs to alcohol withdrawal, and even the oblique admission that both he and Annie had become Bertolt’s lovers. By the time he and Mom drained their drinks, talk had turned to what would happen in the coming days. Annie had at last stopped floating and settled herself in an armchair, knees hugged to her chest and raggedy Luna tucked under her chin, as she listened to Reiner’s questions and Mom’s legal explanations.  
  
When Reiner told Mom that he and Annie would do anything they possibly could to get Bertolt a more lenient sentence, she said that she would do anything in her power to help them. And that was when Reiner broke. He’d been on the brink of crying throughout most of the conversation—the tears held tenuously back by a sense of obligation to be a strong for his mother as images of Bertolt locked up in a cage all alone filled his head—but now he burst into quaking sobs.  
  
“I don’t know what to do, Mom. I—I’m so scared. Wha—what’ll they even do to ‘im in prison? He’s already been hurt—been hurt so much—” Mucus clogged his nostrils and his throat shuddered with each deep breath he took to try to calm himself.  
  
“It’s going to be okay,” Mom gentled, pulling her great big son into her arms and letting him cry against her bony shoulder. “We’re going to do all we can for Bertolt. We’re going to help him. I haven’t forgotten the little boy who stayed for dinner.” She sat back, snuffled, and scrubbed her eyes with the back of her wrist—Mom really did care about Bertolt and it moved Reiner so much that a fresh crop of tears welled up in his eyes.  
  
“Is there any chance he won’t go to jail?” he whispered. “Tell the truth.”  
  
Mom sighed. “I’m sorry, baby,” was all she said. And then they both cried, the silent, steadily dripping sort of crying.  
  
“I wish Dad were still alive,” said Annie very softly, the first words she’d uttered since the car and, as far as Reiner could remember, the first time she’d ever expressed that sentiment.  
  
“Me too,” said Mom, smiling sadly and beckoning Annie over to the couch with one arm.  
  
Surprisingly, Annie actually stood up and trotted over, plunking herself down on Mom’s other side. Annie’s face was dry, her eyes impassive and tired. She didn’t seem far away, though; she was fully present, just much more composed than her brother and mother.  
  
With one arm holding each of her children, Mom sank against the back of the couch. “Your father was always the one who was good at comforting you kids. He’d know exactly what to say right now.”  
  
“You’re doing just fine, Mom,” Reiner said as her fingers petted a soothing pattern on his forearm.  
  
Annie gave a tiny hum of assent. “Mn.”  
  
“My precious children.” Mom squeezed them both. “I’m so sorry your father can’t be here for you, too. My little Leonharts.”  
  
Reiner’s stomach clenched like a fist at the reminder of the one thing still left unsaid and then the words were tumbling out, quiet but clear: “Except I’m not a Leonhart. Dad wasn’t really my father.”  
  
In an instant, Mom’s rounded blue eyes were upon him. “Reiner,” she said, and paused, her look of shock melting into wistful comprehension. “How long have you known?”  
  
“Since I was eight and stumbled on my birth certificate,” he answered. It was as good a time for this talk as he was ever going to get so he would spill it all.  
  
“Uh, do you want me to go to my room or something?” Annie mumbled, squirming in the corner of his vision.  
  
Turning his full attention to her, Reiner reached out and gently cuffed his sister’s wrist. “Stay, Annie. Please.” He held her gaze with his, wordlessly communicating that he needed her with him for this, because no matter how close he felt to Mom right now, it was nothing compared to the trust he’d built with Annie these past years.  
  
“It’s true,” said Mom. “August Leonhart was not your biological father and you were born Reiner Braun.”  
  
Even though he already knew these facts, Reiner still got a cold bubble in his chest when he heard Mom say them officially. He swallowed thickly and said, “Ever since I saw that name on my birth certificate, and the blank space where my father’s name should be, I’ve wondered who he is. Or was. I did my best to act like everything was the same as it had always been, but I couldn’t banish the question. And when I got older, I started to seriously think about finding this guy.”  
  
“Oh, Reiner, baby.” Mom’s whole face quivered and Reiner thought for a second that she would say something about how he could’ve just come to her and asked. But she didn’t, and for that he was grateful.  
  
“I, uh, read your old journal,” he said with a note of chagrin. “The journal you wrote when you were in high school. I borrowed it from Annie who borrowed it from you.” He felt his sister’s glare on the side of his face when he implicated her, but he continued. “While we were living in Philadelphia, I did research on the guys you were friends with in school, which I know must sound crazy and obsessive, especially since the chances of success with such a tactic were next to none. But I just—I was desperate to know where I came from.”  
  
Mom shook her head ruefully. “And you didn’t find him.”  
  
“No,” Reiner answered, even though it hadn’t been a question.  
  
“Your father wasn’t in that journal. I hadn’t met him yet.”  
  
“Yeah, I figured that was probably the case. In times of trouble, though, reason tends to get drowned out.” Here Reiner went quiet, watching Mom’s face as a look of tranquil resolve settled over her features. On Mom’s other side, Annie looked interested but wary, and Reiner could tell that she sensed what was coming just like he did: Mom was about to share the story he’d been waiting to hear for over half of his lifetime.  
  
“I always intended to tell you the whole truth when you were old enough. I know, I know—that’s probably what parents always say when their secrets are found out by their kids, but it is true. And I know you’ve been old enough for a while, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it without August by my side, and then you were gone for three years—But you know what, it doesn’t matter. I’m going to tell you everything now. Actually, the fact that you’ve read my journal makes this a little bit easier since you already know the basics of my family background.  
  
“As you’ve read, the Braun family was— _is_ —very wealthy. Old money, the sort who rear their children under rigorous patrician ideals of decorum and discretion. And, as you’ve read, I was something of a rebel to those ideals. Not serious truancy—sneaking out to the movies with friends, rendezvousing with boys from working class families, that sort of thing. My most egregious offense was insisting I be allowed to enroll in public school. But that was enough for my parents to be concerned. So when I went away to college, it was a small, all-women, liberal arts school of their choosing, where they could keep their eyes on me through the professors and staff.  
  
“I studied art history and I guess I cleaned up my act enough to satisfy my parents because when I had the opportunity to spend my junior year in Europe, they let me go. After two years of unmitigated supervision, though, the freedom of being an ocean away was too tempting and I found outlets for all my pent up frustration down every street and around every corner. I neglected my studies in favor of discotheques, booze, marijuana, and sex.”  
  
There was a long pause here, Mom drawing in a deep breath in preparation for the most crucial part of her story.  
  
“There was a man,” she said with slow deliberation. “I lived with him in Germany for about a month. Even in the midst of my wild phase, I knew that it was not a healthy relationship, but I was drawn to him like a moth to fire. He called himself Moses, never told me his real name, and he was an avant garde artist. Gorgeous, definitely, and brilliant, so I thought, but also violently temperamental, with a penchant for heroin and liquor. My beautiful, tortured genius. Until he hit me. Because I refused to sleep with other men to get him more money for drugs.  
  
“When he threatened to kill me, I fled back home to my parents, who welcomed me back into the fold. And then kicked me out when they found out I was pregnant. Or rather, they gave me an ultimatum—I could go away to a so-called ‘spa’ until the baby was born, give it up for adoption, and come back home pretending nothing had happened, or I could fend for myself. Frankly, I couldn’t believe they still had those kinds of places in the nineteen-nineties—such a Victorian notion—and I was not going to give away my child just to spare my parents embarrassment.  
  
“So I got myself a crappy job, moved into a crappy apartment with a friend, and enrolled at NOVA Community College. I was set on being independent. And wouldn’t you know it, on my very first day of classes, I parked off campus and arrived back at my car just in time to catch a very handsome young cop assigning me a parking ticket. He said he’d let me off with just a warning since it was my first offense and then he very awkwardly asked me out on a date, blurting out that it wasn’t a condition of him dropping the ticket, he just thought I was cute. I told him that I was flattered but was upfront about the fact that I was pregnant, a veritable ticking time bomb of responsibility. And he told me he didn’t care. So I agreed to go out with Officer August Leonhart.  
  
“He dealt with the pregnancy situation remarkably well, went with me to my doctor appointments and lamaze class. He even helped me take legal action to make sure my ex had no rights to you. When you were born, Reiner, August was holding my hand. And we both fell hopelessly in love with you the moment we saw you. I declared you my precious Reiner Braun, but he asked if we would become Leonharts, you and I. Of course I said yes.”  
  
Mom had sweetly nostalgic tears in her eyes and she was smiling at Reiner as if she could see in him traces of the man who’d had no genetic connection to him but loved him just the same.  
  
“That’s kind of—beautiful,” said Annie. Her face was wan and vague and Reiner wondered what kinds of feelings Mom’s tale of unplanned pregnancy must have stirred up in her. “And it explains why we’ve never met anyone from the Braun side of our family. But what I don’t get, is why you wanted to give Reiner the Braun name in the first place. I mean, your parents were kind of awful to you.”  
  
“True,” said Mom, nodding. “But I was a Braun, too. We all have to come from somewhere, even if the circumstances aren't ideal.”  
  
“Just like how Bertolt is a Hoover,” said Reiner, “despite his father being a truly horrible bearer of the name.”  
  
“That’s right,” said Mom. “And you were a Braun, Reiner, but only very briefly. There was nothing wrong with the name, but when August and I married and he adopted you, I decided we should all match. You _are_ Reiner Leonhart.” She hugged him fiercely when she said this.  
  
Reiner hugged back. “I know,” he said, his soft voice nearly breaking. “But I wouldn’t mind being Reiner Braun, either. Dad was incredible—but you’re pretty incredible, too, Mom. Thank you. For telling me this.”  
  
“Thank _you_ ,” she whispered into his hair. “Thank you for coming into my life and thank you for coming back. And Annie, too.” She pulled her daughter closer. “I love you both so much.”  
  
The funny thing was, after learning the whole story, Reiner never even thought about the degenerate German artist whose DNA he’d inherited. He’d long assumed that learning the identity of his biological father would have some profound effect on him, but it didn’t. What touched him instead was his mother’s strength—to leave a man who mistreated her, to pull herself back from the brink only to have to start over from nothing. There was no doubt in his mind that if she hadn’t met August Leonhart, she would’ve been quite capable of raising him on her own without asking her family for help (though of course he was very glad she had met Dad).  
  
With no disrespect intended towards Dad—and without making any legal changes—Reiner decided from then on to use the last name Braun, in honor of his mother.  
  
In the days that followed, Mom would prove her love by spearheading the effort to get Bertolt a merciful sentence. She even got Mrs. Hoover to testify to her son’s character and reveal, amidst copious tears, the hardships of his upbringing. When Annie shared the full extent of Roger Bailey’s creepy advances (including some leering overtures that Reiner hadn’t even known about), Mom’s face was painted with remorse and sorrow, but she kept her eyes forward. And her efforts paid off: though his crime could have merited anywhere up to ten years in prison, Bertolt was only given nineteen months, along with mandatory psychological counseling and anger management.  
  
Still, nineteen months was a long time. Even knowing that this was the best possible outcome, Reiner had wept uncontrollably when the judge handed down her decision. Annie, who had remained so composed for the duration of the hearing, looked physically ill by the end. She’d bottled up her emotions and they’d corroded her from the inside like acid until, finally, her immune system gave out—she had literally worried herself sick.  
  
Never would Reiner forget how haggard Annie looked during their last visit with Bertolt before he was sent away to serve his time. That image of her—waxen skin and gaunt cheeks, gray crescents beneath her eyes, lank, lusterless hair—was pressed permanently in his memory like a lithograph. Reiner, though physically healthy, had matched her in spirit. It was the worst day of both of their lives; probably Bertolt’s as well, but it was hard to know for sure since he’d had some real doozies in his early childhood.  
  
They were allowed fifteen minutes with Bertolt in a featureless, eight-by-ten-foot concrete room, a security officer observing them stonily through a narrow window in the door. Bertolt was already clad in an orange prison jumpsuit, which didn’t quite fit his frame—the arms and legs were long enough, but it was baggy everywhere else, making him look incredibly small for a six-foot-four young man.

It was the first time Reiner and Annie had spoken to him directly since he turned himself in to the police.  
  
“Hey,” Bertolt greeted, wiggling his fingers in the same shy wave he’d used the first time Reiner ever saw him. He was fidgety and nervous and wore a self-conscious little smile—in other words, he was the same Bertolt that Reiner and Annie knew and dearly loved. “Your mom was amazing,” he said. “I mean, you two were amazing, too. You really—” His face puckered to hold in tears. “You really came through for me, and just look at the difference you made.”  
  
Reiner didn’t know what to say, but Annie did, getting right in front of Bertolt and aiming her pallid face up at his. “Don’t do that,” she said in a low, strained voice. “Don’t smile and act like everything is okay. You’re going away, Bertolt, _for nineteen months_.”  
  
One half of Bertolt’s smile fell. “It could have been ten years.”  
  
In the blink of an eye, Annie lunged, seizing two fistfuls of loose orange jumpsuit. Reiner thought for sure that the security officer outside would burst through the door to tear her off of the prisoner, but when he darted a glance at the window, the officer was still just observing soberly.  
  
“It _could_ have been ten years!” Annie hissed Bertolt’s words back at him through bared teeth, voice cracking, teardrops glittering at the corners of her eyes. “What were you even thinking when you walked into that police station?”  
  
This would’ve been an ideal time for Reiner to cut in with a calming remark, but in truth he was wondering the exact same thing so he kept his mouth shut and waited for Bertolt’s answer. The blinking astonishment on Bertolt’s face gave way to a furrowed look of concern and Reiner knew that he was just now taking in the sickly state of Annie’s visage.  
  
“I was thinking about forever,” Bertolt said softly. He reached out and curled his fingers under the corner of Annie’s jaw and her hands released the front of his jumpsuit, her eyes gently closing. “Even ten years isn’t that long when it’s part of forever. And we don’t even have to wait two.”  
  
A line of wet snaked down Annie’s cheek as she whispered, “But we could’ve had forever without you turning yourself in. The three of us could have carried on the way we were living indefinitely. I mean, we’d finally gotten everything right and you—” Her words broke up and she hugged her arms around her stomach.  
  
Reiner stepped closer, wrapping one arm around his little sister—her body felt uncharacteristically thin beneath her hoodie—and the other arm around Bertolt. Just that small amount of contact with Bertolt’s body, through a layer of heavy twill, kindled Reiner’s nerves with the memory of their lovemaking in the shower and the hairs on his arms bristled excitedly. That event had been the launching point for Reiner’s dreams becoming reality and he’d been fool enough to believe that it was happily ever after from there on out. But here he was saying goodbye, unsure when he’d hold Bertolt in his arms again or kiss those sweet lips.  
  
“That wasn’t the kind of life you two deserved,” said Bertolt. “On the run, struggling to find work and earn enough money to scrape by, unable to go back to school, to college, and become the people you were meant to be.”  
  
“But we had you,” Reiner said quietly, his first utterance of the visit.  
  
Bertolt turned that beautiful, melancholy smile on Reiner, his dark eyes slick and shining. “You still have me. Like I said back at Ymir and Historia’s, as long as you want me, I am yours.”  
  
On this cue, as if they shared one mind, Reiner and Annie both pressed in close and threw their arms around Bertolt, squeezing him in coordinated protectiveness.  
  
“Ours,” Annie said, her stubborn voice muffled by Bertolt’s sleeve, in which she’d buried her face.  
  
Reiner’s height put him in a better position, just right to nuzzle his nose and lips into the spot where Bertolt’s neck and jaw connected. The skin was warm and dewy and smelled incredible, and Reiner couldn’t keep himself from feathering soft kisses just below Bertolt’s ear.  
  
Bertolt shivered and let out a breathy sigh. “God I’m going to miss you two so much.”  
  
“Oh, we’re going to see you every chance we get,” said Reiner. The term conjugal visit rang in his mind—something to ask about later.  
  
“No,” Bertolt said with surprising bluntness as he pushed himself backwards out of the embrace. His expression was as somber as a funeral guest’s.  
  
“What do you mean?” Reiner asked measuredly. He could feel his pulse in his stomach.  
  
“Yeah,” Annie said. “What do you mean?”  
  
“I mean—” Bertolt sucked on his lower lip for a second, visibly pained by what he was about to say. “I mean I don’t want you two to come visit me in prison.”  
  
“What?” Reiner spat, in unison with Annie.  
  
Bertolt flinched.  
  
“Five more minutes,” a voice boomed from a speaker hidden somewhere in the room.  
  
“The reason I turned myself in was so that you two could finally be free,” Bertolt continued in a brisker (but no less regretful) voice. “You’ve let my mistakes dictate the course of your lives for far too long. Now it’s time for you to chart your own paths, live any kind of lives you want. I’ll take my punishment, and nineteen months from now, I’ll be free, too. And if you still want me—”  
  
“ _If_ we still want you?” Annie interrupted, her tone thick with incredulity. “That’s not even up for questioning.”  
  
“Bertolt, no matter where you are, you are a part of the lives we want to live,” said Reiner. “That was decided a long time ago.”  
  
“But you’ll have so many other things to do and it’s not like the prison is just down the street.” Bertolt’s voice was almost pleading.  
  
Annie snorted. “I think we’re pretty accustomed to long car rides together by now. It’ll be nice to take some road trips between studying for GEDs and looking for crappy jobs.”  
  
“No,” said Bertolt, eyes falling closed—there was a sense of finality to it, like any objection would be futile. His eyes reopened and he sighed. “Look, it’s not just about what I think would be best for you two. It’s also about what I think would be best—or, well, most bearable—for me. I’m no stranger to depravation. When I was little, there were days when all I got to eat for lunch was packets of condiments and soup crackers that my Ma had stolen from fast food joints. And it was just as wretched as it sounds, but the worst part was having to walk past bakeries and restaurants and see all the delicious things that I couldn’t have.”  
  
“So, having us visit you while you’re in prison would be like seeing food you don’t get to eat?” Annie didn’t sound convinced.  
  
Reiner wasn’t feeling it either. “I get what you’re saying, Bertolt, but Annie and me aren’t food, we’re the people who love you. You really don’t want to see us at all?”  
  
Bertolt’s face had grown more agonized as this talk went on and now he looked to be on the verge of breaking down into sobs. When he spoke, the sound scraped thinly from his throat. “It’s not that. You two—you think I am a lot stronger than I actually am. The truth is, I think the only way I’ll be able to make it through this is if I can imagine you living your lives happily. Instead of looking at you, looking at me in my cage with such sadness in your eyes—the way you’re looking at me now. If the sentence were any longer, I’d probably have no other choice but to subject myself to that further torture, but as it is, this is the best way. So please, promise me you won’t visit me. Or write to me.”  
  
“You won’t even let us write to you?” Reiner asked, warm tears spilling down in twin rivulets on either side of his mouth.  
  
Bertolt shook his head sadly. “It’ll just make it harder.”  
  
“But won’t you be lonely?” Annie said, her voice very small.  
  
“Yes.” Bertolt had lost the battle to hold in his tears and his eyes leaked like burst pipes. “But I was thinking I’d let my Ma come and see me, and maybe we can start to heal what Pop broke. Please, don’t be too mad at me. I know my decision is selfish, but It’ll be worth it when I get out and can be with you again. Just promise me you’ll focus only on your own lives.”  
  
“If that’s what you want,” Reiner said in a shaky whisper. “I promise I won’t try to visit or contact you, Bertl. But you know I can’t promise not to think about you every single day. I love you, Bertolt Hoover. I always have and I always will.”  
  
Annie bobbed her head. “It’s the same for me,” she rasped. “I’ll respect your wishes, but I’ll spend the next nineteen months missing the hell out of you. Just remember, when you get out, you’re coming to stay with us. Forever, you hear?”  
  
The door opened with soft _whoosh_ and the security officer stepped inside, his face not quite sympathetic, but decidedly less dour than it had been at the start. “Alright, time to wrap it up,” he said.  
  
“Well then, I guess this is goodbye,” Bertolt said. “For a while.”  
  
Without warning, Annie flung herself on him, arms roping his middle and face smushed against his chest. It was such an atypical move for her that Reiner’s mouth actually fell open for a second. “I love you, Bertolt,” she cried hoarsely into the orange fabric. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”  
  
Bertolt’s face contorted in abject sorrow above Annie’s head and he forced his features into composure before delicately lifting her chin so their gazes met. “Please don’t cry,” he whimpered through a glaze of his own tears. “I love you back tenfold, Annie. You are my angel.” Then he bent his head as she stood on tiptoes, hooking her hands up around his neck as they kissed long and deep.  
  
The security officer darted his eyes away, but Reiner watched with approval and longing and sadness. When the kiss broke, he saw Bertolt whisper something into Annie’s ear, and then it was his turn.  
  
“Reiner,” Bertolt whispered, arms reaching. “My rock.”  
  
If Reiner was a rock, he was crumbling—a fractured and weatherbeaten monolith finally crushed to rubble. Swiftly, he went to Bertolt’s arms and they enfolded each other, clinging together as if their lives depended on it. “I don’t want you to go away,” Reiner confessed meekly.  
  
Bertolt’s fingers worked soothing circles on Reiner’s back. “It’s only temporary,” he said in a breaking voice. “I’ll come back to you. I love you, Reiner.” The kiss that followed was deep and tender, the kind of kiss that makes everything else in the world disappear for a minute: no concrete walls, no security officer, no prison sentence—just the two of them.  
  
But all too soon it ended, with Bertolt’s lips slipping away and the center of Reiner’s chest aching as if he’d been punched with a brass-knuckled fist. He felt the warm caress of Bertolt’s breath against his ear.  
  
“The next time we’re together, it will be forever.”  
  
Reiner knew it was the same thing he’d said to Annie.  
  
  
Back in the present, Reiner saw the big green highway sign indicating his exit and swerved the silver Subaru onto the offramp. He’d been so caught up in his memories that he almost missed it. “That was close,” he muttered aloud to himself.  
  
According to the Google Maps directions he’d printed out—Reiner still stubbornly refused to get one of those dashboard navigation systems everyone else loved so much—it was now less than twenty minutes to Stohess Correctional Facility. How had the drive gone by so quickly? His heart hopped like a skittish frog in his throat, a flareup of anxiety.  
  
He should have brought Annie with him. What was he thinking, doing this all alone? And for what? To give her a surprise that was more likely to result in fury than delight? Now he had to face the moment of truth by himself, and rather than feeling lucky to have this honor all to himself, he was terrified.  
  
The last words Bertolt had ever spoken to him echoed inside Reiner’s mind, still bearing the same sweet cadence as when they were uttered: “The next time we’re together, it will be forever.”  
  
Nineteen months—well, eighteen and a half with Bertolt’s early release—had passed without seeing or communicating with each other. The question hung darkly over Reiner’s thoughts: What if Bertolt didn’t want him anymore? What if, at some point during all those long days spent in quiet reflection in his cell, he’d decided he could only be in a relationship with one person? It would be Annie. Of course it would be Annie. Unless it wasn’t. But could Reiner really be happy with Bertolt if Annie’s heart was broken? And what if Bertolt no longer wanted either of them?  
  
Reiner had no idea what sort of psychological effects prison time might’ve had on Bertolt. No matter how nice the facility, nineteen months locked up was bound to change a person. Then again, Reiner had changed in nineteen months, Annie even more so, and they both were still devoted to Bertolt. It was the immutable truth at the center of their rapidly evolving lives: they loved Bertolt Hoover.  
  
Ultimately, excitement and yearning outweighed the fear. For weeks after returning home, Reiner had slept clutching Bertolt’s unwashed shirts to his face, just to carry the smell of the man he loved into his dreams. He continued even after the clothes had lost Bertolt’s actual scent, and Reiner knew he was just imagining it was still there. But imagination was all he had. Dreams were all he had. Until today. Whether or not they could pick things back up exactly where they’s left off, the real Bertolt was waiting and Reiner would never, ever let him down.  
  
At the next traffic signal, Reiner turned right, towards Stohess Correctional Facility, which was only five more miles.

 

  
Bertolt chaffed sweaty palms on the knees of his jeans, knowing they’d be damp again in a matter of minutes. Sweating was his body’s unavoidable natural response to a wide range of emotions, from excitement to anxiety, though he couldn’t say precisely which he was experiencing now. Probably a complex mixture.  
  
The waiting room was smallish and fluorescent lit, with gray walls and a linoleum floor and two rows of molded plastic chairs on steel beams that were bolted down fast. Except for Bertolt and a bored looking guard who kept looking at her watch despite there being a large clock mounted on the wall, the place was empty.  
  
He’d finished up all his paperwork, gathered up the sparse possessions from his cell in a cardboard box (which now rested on the chair beside him), and changed out of his jumpsuit and into the civilian clothes Ma had dropped off on her last visit: new jeans and a light green button-up shirt from Target. When he’d put them on, a twinge of guilt had run through him. Though she hadn’t said anything, he knew that Ma wished she could be the one to come and retrieve him. And it was true that he and Ma had made a lot of progress towards repairing their relationship in the past year and a half, but Bertolt’s intention had always been to go home to Reiner and Annie. They _were_ his home.  
  
Or at least they had been. And remained so in his heart. He hoped they still felt the same way about him. More sweat oozed from his pores.  
  
Formulating an ETA for Reiner (and maybe Annie as well) was tricky without knowing when he’d left—and made trickier by Bertolt’s abysmal knowledge of state geography—so Bertolt could only guess it would be sometime in the morning. And wait.  
  
Idle time was definitely not what Bertolt’s overwrought brain needed needed right now, but unfortunately it could not be helped. So he sat in his chair, intermittently tapping toes and drumming fingers and otherwise trying to distract himself from worrying about his imminent reunion with Reiner. And, he hoped, Annie. Reiner was the one he’d named as his escort simply because at the time of his incarceration Annie didn’t have a driver’s license. But maybe she did now. Maybe she was in college. Maybe Reiner was, too. Or maybe they had jobs.  
  
In nineteen months, Reiner and Annie might have accomplished any number of wonderful and exciting things and Bertolt was giddy to finally hear about them. And terrified by the possibility of other kinds of changes—it wasn’t things like driving and college and jobs on which his mind dwelled, but on changes of heart, the idea that one or both of them might have fallen out of love while he was away.  
  
They’d been incommunicado for long enough that moving on would only be natural for two amazing, attractive, free young people. Their love for him had felt too good to be true from the start, so how could he be surprised or upset if either one’s feelings changed in nineteen months? Especially now that their lives were stable and filled with endless possibility. Why should they stay tethered to a man in a cage?  
  
 _“Until now,”_ a kindly voice chimed inside his head. It was the voice of Dr. Ral, the young, pretty, strangely familiar psychiatrist with whom Bertolt had bi-weekly sessions. “Until now” was one of the go-to phrases she’d taught him to combat his self-defeating thoughts (which, he was shocked to learn, were not just him being a realist). Yes, he was a man in a cage—until now. He had been isolated from the two people he loved—until now.  
  
Churning up more nuggets of Dr. Ral’s wisdom from his memory—avoid black and white thinking, don’t assume the worst, replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts—he did his best to redirect his worries into optimistic channels. Reiner and Annie would always care about him, no matter what. And he had no evidence to suggest that they didn’t still love him just as they had before. Well, to be fair, he had no evidence at all regarding their lives and mindsets since his incarceration, but that didn’t mean they’d stopped loving him, even if they had changed in other ways. Bertolt should know; after all, he’d undergone profound changes of his own and his love for both of them hadn’t abated in the slightest.  
  
Nineteen months is nineteen months, whether one is confined to a correctional facility or living free in the wider world, and while the outside was certainly more conducive for big external changes—jobs and houses and all that—the inside was an ideal setting for making internal changes. What else was there for him to do in prison but reflect on his life and his choices? Bertolt understood now why there were so many stories of inmates finding religious faith while serving time (though his own breakthroughs were psychological in nature).  
  
The sessions with Dr. Ral had been instrumental to Bertolt’s growth. With patience and gentleness, she’d drawn out a lot of the pain, physical and emotional, that his parents had inflicted on him during his childhood, like suppuration from a festering wound. Her objective was not to have him blame Pop and Ma for everything they did wrong, nor to excuse them, but to make him see that he was not ruined by their abuse and neglect, that he had it within him to heal and become stronger from his ordeal. The choice to forgive, she’d left to him. Bertolt would not forgive his Pop. But he decided he would try to forgive his Ma.  
  
Reconciliation with Ma was by far the most significant development of Bertolt’s months in prison, but it began before he’d even been sentenced, with the unanticipated appearance of Lynne Hoover at his hearing in front of the judge. Ms. Leonhart—that remarkable woman who’d raised Reiner and Annie—had been the one to organize the case for clemency and she was the one who’d drafted Ma to the cause. When Bertolt saw his mother that day, however, he knew that she wanted to be there.  
  
It was Bertolt’s first glimpse of Ma in over three years and she looked like she’d aged at least a decade in that time. Her skin was sallow and etched with deep lines, her eyes sunken, her dark hair run through with stripes of steel grey. For a fleeting moment, he’d wondered if his departure had exacerbated her drinking and smoking, but he pushed that idea from his mind with a reminder that it didn’t matter at this point.  
  
Her testimony had not been easy to listen to—she shared stories of Frank Hoover’s many abuses in far more detail than Bertolt had given Annie and Reiner—but the hardest part had been watching the other faces in the room react to her testimony, which Bertolt verified was completely true.  
  
And then, in a monologue fractured by sobs, she confessed to her own mistreatment of her son.  
  
“I was sick— _am_ sick—and I have been for a long time. I know—I know I can’t blame the things I’ve done to Bertie on what that man did to me—to _us_. But—Oh god, my sweet little Bertie! He’s always been a sweet boy. A gentle boy. Frank hit him for his gentleness. And I—I ridiculed him. Called him a wuss and a faggot—told him he was weak. But really I was the weak one—I cut him down because I was afraid that—that if he ever realized how good a life he deserved—he would leave me. It’s only natural that he would be triggered to violence to protect those he loved—because the people who were supposed to love and protect him, only hurt him.”  
  
Here she broke down into inconsolable wails of, “I’m sorry, Bertie! I’m so, so sorry! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” and she had to be escorted from the room.  
  
But her confession stayed with Bertolt, huddled inside his consciousness, for the rest of the hearing. His encounter with Pop in Las Vegas had demonstrated that claims of repentance were cheap, especially coming from someone with a history of cruelty, but there was something in Ma’s bleary pink eyes, or maybe it was the desperate tone of her voice, that struck him as sincere. It was an indefinable vibe he got that she actually wanted to change her ways. And he actually wanted to give her another chance.  
  
Bertolt offered Ma visitation privileges conditionally: he would only let her visit as long as she went to weekly AA meetings. He also suggested that she seek psychological counseling and treatment for depression, though he didn’t make it requirement. The smoking he didn’t even address since it was a struggle he’d never known. Ma agreed, embracing him with grateful tears in her eyes, which Bertolt took as evidence that she was serious about mending their relationship, but he knew to keep on his guard.  
  
The first visit, which took place a few weeks into Bertolt’s sentence, was undeniably awkward for both parties. Bertolt was escorted by a prison officer into a brightly lit room with windowed vestibules along one wall, each with a stainless steel stool and a black telephone receiver.  
  
“Third from the end,” the officer had said, nodding his chin in the vague direction of the designated window.  
  
Bertolt approached cautiously, his breath held, as if exhaling would portend disaster. Ma was already seated on the other side of the glass, waiting for him with a nervous smile on her thin lips. Finally letting out the air in his lungs, Bertolt sank down onto the stool and for a few seconds just looked at her. She appeared healthier than she had at the hearing; her cheeks were damp from crying, but her eyes weren’t red or pouchy. Her skin was more florid and her hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail instead of frizzing about her shoulders like a storm cloud. She was dressed nicer, too, in a blouse and slacks, which, if they weren’t new, were at least clean and in good repair.  
  
With another small sigh of relief, Bertolt picked up the phone receiver and Ma did the same on her side. “Hey,” he said softly.  
  
Ma squirmed and dropped her eyes to her lap. “H-hi, Bertie,” she said in a shy, wobbly voice. “You, uh, you adjusting okay to things—in here?”  
  
“I’m doing alright.” Bertolt had never seen his mother act so self-consciously and wasn’t exactly sure of the best way to talk to her. “Apparently word gets around quickly here because within three days everyone knew I’d knocked a guy into a trophy for trying to get fresh with an underage girl. I guess as far as crimes go, it’s not considered too heinous. A few guys even congratulated me, though of course I’m not proud.” Ma lifted her eyes to stare at him with concern—maybe that was too prisony for an opener. “So, how have you been?”  
  
The subject shift had an instant calming effect on Ma’s expression. “I’m hanging in there. I won’t lie to you and say it’s been easy. Been to two Alcoholics Anonymous meetings so far and the people are all real nice. In the end, though, even with nice people cheering you on, quitting booze is a real bitch.”  
  
“That it is,” said Bertolt. “But it’s worth it. Trust me.”  
  
Ma smiled. “I do trust you, Bertie. Already I can see how things might get better. I was thinking I might try to find myself a better job, something with decent insurance so I can go see a head shrinker like you said.”  
  
“Only if you want to, Ma. I just thought, you know, that it might be good to have a professional to talk to about your feelings and the things you’ve been through. They sent a psychiatrist to see me. Dr. Ral—well, she said I could call her Petra, but I don’t know about that. I’ve only met with her once, but I think I’m going to keep it up.” He paused. “I think she’s going to help me to get better. And to not hate myself so much.”  
  
“Oh Bertie.” Ma’s voice pitched high, her eyes scrunched and her lower lip trembled as she was taken by another wave of teary emotion. “I can’t believe my sweet baby boy is in the joint. I can’t believe I let this happen to you. I’m so sorry, Bertie.”  
  
“Ma, please try to calm down,” he said, shrinking in his seat. He didn’t know how to deal with this side of his mother, which was similar to the side of her that used to guilt trip him into enabling her addictions, but not quite. “It’s not your fault that I’m in here. I mean, you aren’t blameless, but ultimately I am responsible for my actions. You were abused, too, Ma.”  
  
She nodded glumly. “Yes. By your father and by your grandfather.”  
  
The part about Gramps was a new reveal, but Bertolt tried to act like he already knew—it didn’t surprise him, really, considering what little he remembered of the brutal, slur and obscenity spewing Vietnam veteran. “Dr. Ral said that abuse is a cycle. People who are abused often go on to become abusers themselves.” A stitch of pain throbbed in his belly when he said these words aloud, just as it had the first time he’d heard them. “But she also said that they don’t have to. I don’t want to hurt anyone ever again, especially not the people I love.”  
  
“The Leonhart girl,” Ma said, then added, after a brief pause, “and her brother.”  
  
“Annie and Reiner, yes.”  
  
“And you really do love both of them, huh?” Her tone was curious but refreshingly judgment-free.  
  
“Yeah,” said Bertolt, nodding. “I love both of them. And they love me.” Suddenly, the ache to see them, which he’d been fighting tooth and nail to subdue into a low-level background pain, became a crushing weight on his chest, and all it had taken was for him to say their names and that he loved them. He felt a powerful urge to blurt out to Ma that he’d made a big mistake in cutting them off and to beg her to pass the message along to them. But he held his tongue.  
  
It was obvious from the way she bit down on her lip that Ma had more questions she wanted to ask him about his sexuality and his relationship with the siblings, but she too held her tongue, and for that Bertolt was grateful. “You know, Bertie,” she finally said, “I can’t really imagine you ever hurting either one of them. You’ve never been anything like your father. Or like me, for that matter. You’ve got more sweetness in you than the two of us put together. I can hardly even believe you hit the man who—” She stopped abruptly, face painted with chagrin.  
  
“The man whose death I am responsible for,” Bertolt supplied quietly. For several stretched-out seconds, the only noises exchanged through the phones were those of nervous breaths.

Ma’s expression turned morose. “I’m sorry,” she finally said.  
  
“It’s not a pleasant thing to have to acknowledge,” said Bertolt, “but I deserve to be in here.”  
  
“Don’t say that, Bertie,” Ma squeaked.  
  
“It’s the truth,” he said, calm and serious. “Ma, I do my best to be gentle and unobtrusive because I hate conflict. But there is anger in me and it scares me.” Here his voice grew reedy and the corners of his eyes prickled. “That guy Roger Bailey was a creep and loser, but he didn’t deserve to die. I lost control of myself just once and look what happened? It terrifies me to think about it ever happening again. Giving up alcohol was the first and biggest step toward getting better, and Reiner and Annie’s loyalty and trust have bolstered me so much, but there is still something inside me that’s broken. I’m just hoping I can use my time in here to fix it.”  
  
“My dear Bertie—” Ma’s tears were flowing freely again. “I want to be the mother I should have been to you for your whole life.”  
  
“It’s not too late, Ma. Really, it’s not. The reason I said you could visit me if you did AA, the reason I told you to consider getting help—it’s because I thought we’d both heal better if we did it together.” He reached out his hand and pressed it, fingers splayed, against the glass.  
  
Ma switched the phone to her other side so she could mirror his gesture, placing her small hand to his large one. “You’ll let me come see you again?”  
  
“As long as you keep going to AA meetings and fight your hardest to stay sober.”  
  
“I will,” she said nodding vigorously. “I promise you I will, Bertie.”  
  
“Time’s up!” the prison officer hollered with improbably good timing.  
  
“Until next time,” was how Bertolt had said goodbye, believing that his mother we keep her promise.  
  
  
Subsequent visits with Ma became progressively easier as they grew more comfortable with each other. It was an odd thing, Bertolt knew, to have to warm up to the woman who had raised him, but their relationship had been turbulent for so many years, with her pouring her bitterness and derision like poison into him while he just soaked it all up and rotted from the inside. The Ma who came to see him in prison each week was almost like a different person, a stranger with his mother’s face and memories, and though Bertolt remained wary for the first several months, slowly but surely this Ma earned his trust.  
  
True to her word, Ma continued attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and brandished her commemorative chips and coins and tokens as proof. While she never explicitly said so, Bertolt was fairly certain that her newfound sobriety was the main factor in her landing a better job, one with a health plan that generously covered psychiatric care. So Bertolt saw Dr. Ral and Ma saw Dr. Bozard, and mother and son soon had an inside joke going that their psychiatrists should meet and fall in love.  
  
Little by little, Bertolt opened up to Ma about his feelings (though she never needled him to disclose anything he’d discussed with Dr. Ral and he showed her the same courtesy), and his cautious friendship with her came to feel more and more like a real child-parent relationship.  
  
Bertolt never fully overcame his doubts about the decision not to see Annie and Reiner. During every visit with Ma he fought an internal battle not to talk about them or ask her to pass along communication to them. His resolve was not a matter of testing his willpower but of him fearing that if he reached out to them now it would somehow make a mess of things and he’d regret it even more. And he worried, too, whether his motives for wanting to see them were wholly pure—wasn’t it true that he wanted reassurance of their love?  
  
He never said a word to Ma about his Leonharts until his release date began to loom in the near future and the matter of where he would live came up. “I’m going to stay with Reiner and Annie,” he’d said, with no hesitation.  
  
To Ma’s credit, she only asked him, “Are you sure?” one time, and didn’t question him any further when he said that he was. Her eyes looked sad, though, which could have been from the gradual nicotine withdrawal—she’d opened this visit by pushing up her sleeve to show him her Nicoderm patch—but he suspected was at least partially from disappointment.  
  
“I’m still going to see you every week at AA,” he said, smiling gently. “And I’d like it if we spent time together doing other things, too. Like, I don’t know, whatever mothers and sons normally do together.”  
  
“I don’t think I even know,” said Ma, with a lilt in her voice like she was fighting a laugh or a cry.  
  
“Then I guess we’ll find out together,” said Bertolt.  
  
This made a genuine grin blossom on Ma’s face and Bertolt saw, for the first time he could remember, the radiant glow of the woman she must’ve been when she was young, shining through the layers of damage done by Gramps and Pop and cigarettes and booze. She was still beautiful.  
  
“Just remember, Bertie,” she said, “I’ll be here for you if—well, if you ever need me.”  
  
“I know.” He knew she meant that he could live with her if his intended arrangement didn’t work out for any reason, and he did his best to give no indication that a part of him was honestly terrified it wouldn’t.  
  
Although Bertolt didn’t realize it at the time, that would be his last visit with Ma before his release. And now he found himself looking back on that day and experiencing the same current of fear he had then. Was he really ready to face life on the outside?  
  
The clack of a doorknob turning brought him sharply back into the present. His eyes were on the door, watching, unblinking, as it pushed open to reveal a familiar face. A face he loved.  
  
“Reiner,” Bertolt breathed, automatically lifting from his seat.  
  
“Bertolt,” Reiner replied with a flash of white teeth. He turned to the guard and carried out some wordless transaction—handing her a paper or showing his ID—then he returned his attention to Bertolt, though he didn’t move any closer yet.  
  
“Alright Mr. Hoover,” the guard said. “Your ride is here so you’re free to go. You’ve got all the information about your release conditions, correct?”  
  
Bertolt’s eyes were only on Reiner, but he called back a response. “Yes. Thank you.”  
  
“Congratulations, Mr. Hoover,” she said in a very mildly congratulatory tone. “You’re a free man.”  
  
Now Reiner took the first steps towards Bertolt and Bertolt took steps towards Reiner, realized after five that he’d forgotten his box, shuffled back to grab it (rattling the contents with his nervous hands), and this time made a beeline for Reiner.  
  
“Makes it a little hard to greet you with a hug,” Reiner said, eying the box, which Bertolt held in front of his chest.  
  
“Ah, sorry,” said Bertolt. “I wasn’t even thinking, I just—”  
  
“Don’t worry about it.” Reiner’s tone was tender, his face brimming with what Bertolt could only describe as restrained jubilation.  
  
For a minute or two, they just looked at each other, and Bertolt was fully aware that he was staring, but he couldn’t look away. He was held captive by the sight of Reiner—the squareness of his jaw, the golden highlights in his short hair, the amber of his eyes—at once more handsome than ever before and exactly the same as Bertolt remembered him. Then, without any forewarning, Reiner reached out and chucked Bertolt under the chin and Bertolt’s body responded to the touch with an instant shudder of pleasure; it was a caress he’d been starved for the past nineteen months.  
  
“You’ve got a bit of scruff growing,” Reiner observed out loud, his big hand gently tilting Bertolt’s face to view the stubble from all angles.  
  
“It’s not much,” said Bertolt. “Shaving hasn’t really been a priority these days, but I don’t have much of a forest to tame anyway.”  
  
At last relinquishing Bertolt’s chin, Reiner declared, “I like it. Of course, I’m so happy just to see your face, I honestly don’t care how fuzzy or smooth it is.”  
  
Bertolt opened his mouth to say something along the lines of “thank you” or “I’m so happy to see you, too,” but before his rubbery lips could push out any sound Reiner spoke again.  
  
“Alright then, I guess we’d best be hitting the road. You ready to put this place behind you?” Bertolt nodded and Reiner beamed. “Good. Now hand over that box so I can carry it for you.” He didn’t bother to wait for Bertolt to oblige, snatching the box right out of his grip and maneuvering it dexterously under one arm.  
  
“I’ll let you lead the way,” said Bertolt, chuckling nervously. “You know, since I don’t know where you parked.”  
  
“Ha! Right,” said Reiner.  
  
Still ever the gentleman, Reiner held the door open and Bertolt stepped out into the wide, unfenced world of the free. Well, not quite yet—they had to walk through a hallway to reach the door to the outside (which Reiner also held for him, of course), but then he really was free. And, even better than that, he was with Reiner.  
  
As they walked across the tar black parking lot, Bertolt kept expecting, or maybe just hoping, that Reiner would sling the unburdened arm over his shoulders and pull him close. But that didn’t happen. And Bertolt, distracted with wishing for more physical contact, forgot to ask if Annie was waiting for them in the car until they were stopped at a silver Subaru Outback and he could clearly see she wasn’t. Well, if she had come, he would like to think she wouldn't just wait in the car.  
  
“Nice wheels,” he said. “Did the Toyota finally bite the big one?”  
  
“Sadly so.” Reiner pulled a Washington Nationals lanyard, which held his keys, from his pants pocket and pointed the car key at the Subaru while thumbing the unlock button. The car’s lights blinked and it emitted a welcoming chirp. After stowing the box in the backseat, Reiner scuttled around to the passenger side door and opened it for Bertolt.  
  
“Thanks,” said Bertolt as he climbed inside. He felt a little—hmm, rebuffed was too strong a term, but let down didn’t address the anxiety that Reiner’s coolness instilled in him. There was no reason Reiner couldn’t hug him now, but Bertolt didn’t get so much as a pat on the shoulder.  
  
“It’s kind of a funny story, actually,” Reiner said. He paused to buckle his seatbelt and Bertolt had to wait for him to continue to get any indication of what he was talking about. “Since me and Annie took an airplane back to Virginia, the Toyota was left in sunny California. Our Fairy Godlesbians had it towed all the way across the country using a hybrid electric towing company and it up and died a week later. Annie was the one driving it at the time and man was she pissed. Her face was as red and scary as a howler monkey’s. Anyway, our mom was looking to get a new car anyways, so she sold us the Outback on the way cheap. Pretty sweet, huh?”  
  
Sentences unspooled from Reiner’s mouth very quickly and Bertolt recognized fast-talk as the chief tell when he was nervous. Well, at least they were both feeling it. The actual content of Reiner’s speech was mostly lost in passing through Bertolt’s brain, with two utterances of Annie’s name being what stood out most prominently.  
  
“So then, is Annie—?” Bertolt didn’t know how to finish the question so he just let it trail off in his quiet voice.  
  
The car was out on the highway now and Reiner was watching the road, but Bertolt’s question synced up with a red light allowing him to look over when he answered. “Annie had a class today and couldn’t come. She would have, though. Oh yeah, I guess you wouldn’t know that Annie is in college now. George Mason University. And she teaches Muay Thai and kickboxing.”  
  
More of that motormouth, and there was a faint twitching at the corner of Reiner’s lips that made Bertolt think he was holding something back. But Bertolt was in no position to pry. Besides, he’d just gotten an exciting bit of information to follow up on. “Annie is in college?” he asked brightly. “And she’s teaching martial arts? That’s awesome! So what is she studying?”  
  
The traffic light turned green and Reiner’s gaze aimed forward again as he accelerated. It must’ve brought him some relief to look away from Bertolt, because when he answered, his words came at a more reasonable tempo. Annie, he explained, was studying Exercise Science, with an emphasis in Kinesiology, and was already pondering whether or not to pursue a Master’s Degree. Meanwhile, she was the most popular instructor at the sport and health club where she worked, her classes in both disciplines having swelled in attendance so much that they took up the entirety of the largest auditorium, which usually hosted multiple events at once.  
  
Not surprisingly, Reiner had eschewed higher education and gone directly into the workforce. He’d landed a job on a road maintenance crew fairly soon after returning to his old home territory—“working for the government and bringing home government pay,” he proudly declared—and within six months he’d been promoted to foreman. Their living situation had been upgraded, too, thanks to Ms. Leonhart’s thriving legal career. Now the three of them lived in a town house in up-and-coming Loudoun County.  
  
Once Reiner had covered his and Annie’s lives, he talked about Ymir and Historia, and since they had also featured in the brisk tale of the Toyota’s death, which was where this conversation started, it was, in a strange way, completing a circle. Bertolt was able to surprise him with how much he already knew—about Historia’s latest movie, Ymir’s latest novel, and the fact that they had a baby now.  
  
“I’m not totally out of the loop, you know,” said Bertolt. “I still got to read People Magazine in prison, just a week or so later than everyone else.” He finished with a chuckle but Reiner just made the tiniest little grunt of a sound in response and it occurred to Bertolt that maybe Reiner wasn’t comfortable hearing about his time in prison just yet. Hoping to ease the tension, he backpedalled to the Reisses’ baby. “I’ve only seen one picture of Lacie, but she’s adorable.”  
  
A grin brightened Reiner’s profile. “She sure is. The kid takes after Historia, especially the button nose. I’ll have to show you the pictures they emailed us when we get back home.”  
  
Bertolt sighed in relief. “It’s kind of strange, though. I mean, that our friends have a child. It’s so—adult. But I guess we’re adults now, too.”  
  
The smile faded from Reiner’s face, replaced by a look of vague discomfort—lips pressed tight, eyebrows slightly furrowed. Bertolt decided it was time to shut his mouth for a while and the next several miles passed without a single word exchanged between the two of them. In the swelling silence, worries multiplied in Bertolt’s head.  
  
Had he done something wrong? Said the wrong things? What happened to the joy he’d read on Reiner’s features when they first laid eyes on each other?  
  
Perhaps, Bertolt considered, he was just expecting too much too soon. He and Reiner had been separated, without any contact, for longer than they ever had before in all the time they’d known each other. And it’s not as if Bertolt had been on an extended cruise vacation; he’d been in prison for manslaughter, which was bound to cause some apprehension in those he’d left behind. It was only natural that it should take some time for him and Reiner to get back to their old comfort level, right?  
  
Oh, but when Reiner had grabbed his chin, Bertolt still found that touch as potent as ever. And now he just wanted for Reiner’s hands on him again, and to kiss Reiner on the mouth. Judging by the aloof aura currently radiating from the man behind the wheel, though, it might be some time before that happened.  
  
Maybe it wouldn’t happen at all.  
  
It was entirely possible that the reason Reiner was acting so detached was because he no longer wanted an intimate relationship with Bertolt. Back to just friendship.  
  
As he gazed longingly at Reiner’s hands on the steering wheel, Bertolt noticed, for the first time, that Reiner wasn’t wearing the Super Bowl ring on any finger. It didn’t actually mean anything—Bertolt knew it didn’t mean anything—but, against logic, the observation triggered hot to spill from his eyes. He made no sounds, no sniffs or whimpers or even a single sigh of grief, but his crying wouldn’t cease.  
  
Bertolt felt the momentum of the car slow down to a stop, heard the rumble of the engine cut off, and when he aimed his salt-clouded vision out the window he saw that they were parked on the shoulder of the highway as other vehicles zoomed past. Reiner was turned towards him, brow knit in concern.  
  
“Bertl, what is going on?” he asked. “Why are you crying? Did I—?”  
  
“Uh-uh.” Bertolt shook his head, flicking droplets of wet onto his arms. “I’m fine. I’m fine. It’s nothing you did. It’s me. I guess I just—” Catching himself before he made a pitiful confession, he scrubbed his eyes with the balls of his hands and said, “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it, Reiner.”  
  
“It’s not nothing,” said Reiner, his hand reaching to swipe a leftover tear from Bertolt’s cheek. “Tell me.”  
  
Just that little brush of a knuckle, the briefest taste of Reiner’s touch, eased Bertolt’s tension and loosened the truth from his lips. “I’ve just missed you so much,” he said softly. “And maybe it’s stupid insecurity fogging up my judgement, but I just—I’m getting the vibe that maybe you aren’t as excited to have me back as you thought you would be.”  
  
Reiner’s eyes went wide and he lunged across the space between the seats to pull Bertolt into his arms, squeezing tightly. “Oh god, Bertl. I’m so, so sorry. I never meant to give you that impression. It isn’t true at all. I am overjoyed to have you back, so excited I’m at a loss for words. And the truth is—” He drew slightly back, eyes downcast. “I’m nervous. From the moment I saw you in the waiting room I’ve wanted to hold you. Kiss you. But after nineteen months away from me, I can’t assume that you still—”  
  
Impulsively, Bertolt put his mouth on Reiner’s, and Reiner, after a sharp inhale of surprise, melted into it, curving a hand around the back of Bertolt’s neck and gently opening Bertolt’s lips with his tongue. A kiss of life, Bertolt thought, feeling like every cell in his body had suddenly thawed from a deep freeze.  
  
When they pulled apart, Reiner said, between heavy breaths, “I should’ve done that the instant we stepped outside the prison.”  
  
“It’s all good,” said Bertolt, grinning like a fool and not caring one bit. “I’m just relieved that you still want me.”  
  
“Of course I still want you,” Reiner said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.  
  
Sheepishly, Bertolt mumbled, “But you aren’t wearing the ring I gave you.”  
  
Reiner promptly snaked a hand down the front of his shirt and withdrew a chain necklace, the Super Bowl ring dangling from it like a pendant. “I don’t want it to fall off at work and wind up buried under asphalt so I’ve taken to wearing it like this. Over my heart. Where you’ve stayed all this time.  
  
“I’m sorry,” said Bertolt. “I really shouldn’t have doubted you.”  
  
“You don’t have to apologize, Bertl. Like I said, I was afraid _you_ wouldn’t want _me_ after all this time. That those months may have changed you.”  
  
“They _have_ changed me.” Bertolt took one of Reiner’s hands in both of his. “I’m stronger than I used to be. More peaceful inside. But I could never, ever stop loving you and Annie. Even if you two had moved on with your lives.”  
  
Reiner scrunched up his nose. “Moved on with our lives? What you mean like finding ourselves another guy we both adore?” He paused and scratched his chin in mock thoughtfulness and mused, teasingly, “Hmm, now that I think about it, there is this one boy we’re both kind of crazy about, but I think we still have room in our lives for you.”  
  
Bertolt gave his shoulder an affectionate, knock-it-off shove. “Hey, don’t joke. It’s something I genuinely worried about. Not you two liking the same guy specifically. I mean either of you falling in love with somebody else while I was away. You and Annie are extremely attractive, _amazing_ people. Is it really so farfetched to think you might want to date other people? ”  
  
“That is a good point,” said Reiner. “But it just so happens that these two extremely attractive, amazing people would rather wait for the best than settle for anything less. I love you more than ever, Bertolt, and though I know she hates it when I speak on her behalf, I can assure you that Annie still loves you, too.”  
  
“I’m sorry I’m insecure,” said Bertolt. “I’ve been working on it. But I think even if I was the most confident man in the world, I’d still find it hard to believe that two people like you and Annie could both love me so much. Because, you know, I love you so much.”  
  
Then Reiner leaned in and Bertolt leaned in and their mouths met in the middle. Another deep, tender kiss. Another breath of new life.  
  
“Please take me home,” Bertolt whispered.  
  
For the remainder of the trip, Reiner steered with one hand while the other held Bertolt’s, and the two of them talked just like they always had, about anything and everything.  
  
  
The Leonharts’ townhouse was at the very end of a long row of townhouses, one of innumerable, nearly identical rows laid out in a tidy pattern of gently curving parallel streets. Bertolt observed this suburban landscape through his window with fascination: flawless green lawns, clusters of helmeted children on colorful bikes, a well-groomed dog tethered to every person out walking, friendly faces in every skin tone, and pair of women who were clearly a couple holding hands as they chatted with a smiling hetero pair. This was the sort of neighborhood that Bertolt had always considered unattainable, at least for the likes of him. But here he was, newly delivered to this sunshiny community, which, to his great wonder, did not appear to be a creepy, Stepford-like enclave of repressive white conservatism.  
  
By the time the silver Subaru was nestled in its driveway, a fresh crop of butterflies had hatched in Bertolt’s stomach, beating their ticklish wings in anticipation of the second reunion. Before opening his car door, he turned to Reiner and asked, “So, uh, is Annie presently at home or is she in class?”  
  
“She should be home now,” said Reiner. “Oh man, I can’t wait to see the look on her face when you greet her.”  
  
“You really think her reaction will be big?” Bertolt was just a wee bit skeptical about that, given Annie’s masterful pokerface. “I mean, it’s not like it’s a shocking twist or anything. She knows that I’m coming home early so I’m sure she’s already mentally prepared herself.” Reiner looked away, scratching his neck while saying nothing. “She does know I’m coming home today, right?” Bertolt asked.  
  
Reiner flashed him a guilty smile and said, “Not exactly. And by not exactly, I mean not at all. I wanted it to be a surprise. Hope you aren’t mad at me.”  
  
A butterfly riot was underway inside Bertolt’s belly, but he wasn’t mad at Reiner, just extra nervous about how Annie would respond to his unanticipated early arrival. “Are you sure she’ll be happy about this surprise?”  
  
“You kidding? She’ll be thrilled!” Reiner answered, but a sheen of sweat on his forehead belied his uncertainty. “Like I said, she loves you, Bertolt. Now come on, let’s go inside.”  
  
Just from the outside, Bertolt already loved their new house—the black lamppost twined with not-yet-blooming clematis, the bed of daffodils gently bobbing their creamy yellow heads in the breeze, the sandy beige bricks that made up the facade, and the tall steps leading up to the blue painted front door. A neighborhood kid had left a chubby plastic tyrannosaur in the yard and Bertolt even loved that.  
  
“This is where we all live,” said Reiner as he took the lead climbing the steps. “Me and Annie and Mom and—” His voice and his feet both stopped abruptly when he reached the landing and he looked at Bertolt with warm eyes. “And you,” he finished.  
  
Bertolt was about to say how honored he was to be joining their household when the blue door swung in to reveal Annie. Her eyes were scrunched closed and twitching, her jaw was set, and something green was smashed into her chin-length hair, but she was just as beautiful as Bertolt remembered her. More beautiful.  
  
Immediately, without even opening her eyes, she launched into a semi-frenzied rant. “Reiner, thank god! I am so glad you came home for lunch. I cannot get him to eat and you are the only one who—” At last her eyed popped open and when they did her words instantly stopped, her features smoothed. “Bertolt.”  
  
“Hello, Annie,” Bertolt said softly. Warmth filled his chest to hear his name spoken in her voice and to see those clear blue eyes looking up at him.  
  
“Shall I head on inside?” Reiner asked.  
  
“Uh, yeah,” Annie answered him, though her gaze remained intently and exclusively on Bertolt. “Please. He won’t listen to reason.”  
  
Reiner chortled lightly and said, “I don’t know what you expect.” Then he slipped past her into the house, leaving Bertolt alone with her.  
  
Bertolt couldn’t stop smiling. Annie—the real thing, not imaginary—was right in front of him. Bertolt was pretty sure he’d decoded her exchange with Reiner and it made a good opener. “So, he finally talked you into getting a puppy, huh?”  
  
“Yeah,” said Annie, pushing her bangs off her face and tucking them behind her ear. “Something like that.”  
  
Owning a dog had been one of Reiner’s not-so-secret dreams since before they’d gone on the run, but living in a small apartment had made it unfeasible. It struck Bertolt as slightly odd that Reiner hadn't said anything about it on the trip here, but then he figured that Reiner was probably saving it for yet another surprise. Truthfully, Bertolt was more of a cat person, but he couldn’t object to living with a dog when he knew it brought Reiner happiness. And maybe his additional help would relieve Annie of some of the stress this animal was clearly causing her. Ah, but even frazzled she was gorgeous.  
  
“You cut your hair,” said Bertolt. “It looks really cute. I mean—” He felt himself blushing. “You look amazing, Annie. Just like you always do.”  
  
“I look like crap,” she said correctively and then sighed. “But thank you, Bertolt. You look good, too.” Her hands wrung the hem of her purple hoodie, a nervous habit equivalent to Reiner’s talking too fast and just as rarely witnessed since these Leonharts were not fretful types by nature.  
  
“Thank you,” said Bertolt. They were both acting shy, but he knew it wasn’t really shyness on either side—it was the same situation as with Reiner in the car, neither of them knowing what the other might be thinking and both unsure of what to say. She definitely did not look like crap, though. The last time Bertolt had seen her she’d been pale and thin and sickly, and maybe she was a little disheveled at the moment, but compared to back then she looked hearty and hale.  
  
“Sorry if I seem a little unprepared,” she said, and added, with unconcealed irritation at her brother, “Reiner didn’t tell me you were getting out early.”  
  
“It’s okay. Just to be clear, he didn’t tell me that he didn’t tell you until we’d already pulled into the driveway. I had no part in plotting this surprise. Honest.”  
  
One corner of Annie’s mouth tugged up coyly as she looked at him, but her only response was, “Oh, I know.”  
  
Several seconds passed silently. And then she pounced. In a spontaneous burst, Annie jumped up, flung her arms over his shoulders and kissed him on the mouth. Her knees gripped his waist tightly, fighting against gravity until he got his hands under her bottom to support her.  
  
As soon as Bertolt had a secure hold of her body—and, oh, she felt so small and strong and wonderful in his arms—he kissed back passionately. Annie filled every one of his senses: the sweet, faint mint of her lips and the scent of her Dove shampoo, the hums of pleasure from deep in her throat and the weight of her in his arms. Even though his eyes were shut the afterimage of her sculptural face was seared onto their memory. Her hands clenched in his hair and his hands squeezed her rear and they kissed and kissed and kissed until Bertolt began to sway, threatening to lose his balance, and Annie let herself down from his arms.  
  
“Sorry,” she said, her whole face flushed pink. “I guess I got a little carried away there. It’s just been such a long time since I saw you. I couldn’t resist.” Her mouth curled into a sly, feline smile. “Plus I figured Reiner already had his way with you in the car so I wanted to get caught up.”  
  
Bertolt’s cheeks blazed. “You know your brother. But, uh, just for future reference, you never have to apologize for kissing me, Annie. Ever.”  
  
She grinned and said, “Okay.” Then her expression shifted, apprehension slowly leaking onto her features. “I suppose we should head on inside now and do some actual catching up. Have you had lunch?”  
  
“Not yet.” Bertolt shook his head, vaguely unsettled by the change in Annie’s face and the almost imperceptible heaviness in her voice. “So yeah, let’s go in. Lead the way.”  
  
He followed her into the house cautiously and was enveloped by the foreign, fruity aroma of a stranger’s house. It was his house, too, now and in just a few weeks, he probably wouldn’t even notice it anymore. Annie moved to shut the front door and as Bertolt shuffled his feet on the tile entryway to get out of the way, the toe of his shoe landed on something plastic, which tiddlywinked out across the hardwood floor with a clatter. It was a red Lego Duplo brick.  
  
“Glad I still had my shoes on,” said Bertolt. He decided to skip the question of how the brick got there in the first place and went about removing his sneakers.  
  
Annie was already barefoot, but she stood and waited for him. “I would’ve cleaned up a bit if I’d known you’d be coming home today,” she said.  
  
“It’s fine. You know I don’t care about that. Okay, you’re the one who knows the lay of the land, so I’ll let you be my guide.”  
  
As Annie led him through the living room, Bertolt tried to take in what he could of his new home without getting too distracted. There was a framed black and white print of sunflowers that he recognized from the walls of the old apartment, but the furniture all looked like new Ikea stuff. Even though the Leonharts had only moved in less than two years ago and the decor was spare, there was a homey, lived-in quality that Bertolt relished. It was little things, like one of Annie’s many beloved hoodies (a green one bearing her school's initials in gold) slung over the arm of a chair, and a tattered paperback copy of _Storm of Swords_ (possibly the only book Reiner had read more than once) on the coffee table. No sign of that dog yet, so presumably Reiner had it under control.  
  
The kitchen was breathtaking, high-ceilinged and sunlit. There was a gas range and a double wall oven, and a marble topped island with a trio of barstools—a perfect spot for casual eating. Set apart from the rest of the kitchen, bathed in the light from a bay window, was a wooden table with matching chairs. As soon Bertolt saw it, his feet froze in place, his eyes took in the scene in front of them, but his brain could not make sense of it. Seated in one of the chairs but angled away from the table was Reiner, and seated in a highchair in front of him was a pudgy baby with a messy face and fluffy, dark brown hair, flailing its limbs enthusiastically.  
  
A baby.  
  
There was a baby. In their kitchen.  
  
Bertolt blinked his eyes repeatedly, rubbed them with his fists, but the tableau remained. It wasn't a dream or an illusion. Little brother? Little sister? Ms. Leonhart wasn’t too old, right? But his gut told him this wasn’t a new sibling.  
  
He felt Annie’s hand hook around his arm and didn’t resist when she gently guided him closer.  
  
Reiner wore a wider smile than Bertolt had ever seen on him as he spooned Le Sueur peas into the child’s open mouth. “You like your veggies, don’t you, Gus?” he said, oblivious to the presence of Annie and Bertolt.  
  
The baby grinned back at Reiner, showing off four tiny square teeth, and released a string of joyful babble: “Da da da! Um num!”  
  
“He eats for you but not for me,” sighed Annie. “I just don’t get it.”  
  
“What can I say?” Reiner replied, shrugging. “I am a baby whisperer.”  
  
The moment the baby—Gus—laid his big blue eyes on Annie, however, he lost all interest in food and stretched his little hands out towards her with grabby fingers. “Nini! Nini! Nini!” he chimed in his sweet baby voice.  
  
Bertolt swallowed thickly as he watched Annie scoop the kid out of the high chair and deftly maneuver him onto her hip. Reiner stood up, plucked a baby wipe from a tub on the table, and wiped clean Gus’ hands and mouth. Just in time, too, because as soon as the boy noticed that Bertolt was staring at him, he burrowed his face shyly into Annie’s side. They had this routine down pat.  
  
Annie raised her eyes to meet Bertolt’s, her expression conveying a complicated mix of hope and pride and uncertainty. “Bertolt, I’d like you to meet August Reiner Leonhart.” She took a deep breath before adding, “He’s my son.”  
  
“Your—son,” Bertolt said airily as his gaze returned the boy. He was dressed in blue Oshkosh overalls and a t-shirt with a pattern of tiny green frogs. On Annie’s hip, with no taller adults in the picture, Gus looked bigger than he actually was. His soft roundness, however, put him right in that transitional phase between infant and toddler—Bertolt guessed that he could probably walk but wouldn’t make it very far without falling on his tushy.  
  
“I know this isn’t anything you expected to come home to,” said Annie, carefully. Then, after an extended silence asked, “So, uh, what do you think?”  
  
As Bertolt watched the precious, tiny hand grasp for Annie’s sparkly charm bracelet (just barely out of reach), an answer tumbled heedlessly from his mouth: “He is nothing at all like a puppy.”  
  
“Oh no, he’s much cuter than a puppy,” Reiner piped in, not the least bit offended. “We call him Gus, by the way.”  
  
Too curious to stay hidden, Gus turned his head slightly and peered at Bertolt with one eye. He had Annie’s blue eyes, and her long lashes, too, but the downy mop of hair on his head was as dark as bittersweet chocolate, just a shade lighter than Bertolt’s. As for his nose—which was undeniably on the large side for a baby but hopelessly adorable—that could have come from either one of them. The boy was beyond cute; he was gorgeous.  
  
Bertolt’s heartbeat pulsed in his stomach. He didn’t know what he was supposed to say. Should he apologize? The revelation that by shutting out the man and woman he loved while he was in prison he’d unwittingly abandoned this little boy—a boy he didn’t even know existed—brought down a crushing hammer of guilt on his head.  
  
Or it should have.  
  
And it certainly _would_ have if Annie and Reiner didn’t seem so content with the situation. Whatever Annie had gone through when she learned that she was pregnant, that her birth control had failed her, she looked immensely pleased with the end result—the expression she wore as she pressed a kiss to Gus’ wispy hair was pure love. Then there was Reiner, the very picture of a doting new dad. Neither of them showed even a trace of resentment towards Bertolt for not being there to help them raise the child. Bertolt’s child. Gus. His son.  
  
The notion of having a child with Annie was not a new one by any means. It had been a fantasy of Bertolt’s even before he learned that it had almost become a reality, and after Annie showed him that sonogram of their baby that might have been, he couldn’t deny his feelings of hope and longing that maybe, someday, they would have a second chance. Now there was a real, living child in front of his eyes: August Reiner Leonhart, his perfect (and perfectly named) son with Annie.  
  
“Hey there, Gus-Gus,” Bertolt said softly, crouching to be at his eye-level. Gus smiled and ducked his face again and Bertolt’s heart melted.  
  
“He’s kind of shy,” said Reiner. “But he’s really an amazing little guy. You’re going to love him.”  
  
“I already love him.” Bertolt wanted to reach out and touch Gus, hold him in his arms, kiss his chubby little cheeks, but he was terrified that he would make the boy cry. He was a complete stranger to his own son. But Gus was still so young that when he got older he might never even remember a time when Bertolt wasn’t in his life.  
  
Bertolt took Gus’ hand, still soft with baby fat, and held it loosely. The fear that little hand instilled in him was very real: fear that he would do something wrong, that he wasn't good enough, that he was too damaged to be this child’s father. But Gus was his son, and for him, and for Annie and Reiner who were already family, Bertolt would be his bravest self. Leaning in, he kissed Gus’ fingers with trembling lips.  
  
“He turned one last month,” said Annie quietly. “On Valentine’s Day.”  
  
It took just two seconds for Bertolt to comprehend the deeper meaning of her statement. The math was simple: Gus was born seven months after Bertolt made love to Annie. Understanding dawned on Bertolt cold and terrible. When Annie had told him it was safe to come inside her, he’d assumed it was because she was using some kind of birth control. But the real reason was that she must have known that she was already two-months pregnant by another man. A sick, plummeting feeling seized Bertolt’s stomach, like he was inside an elevator that was in freefall. Slowly, he rose back up to full height.  
  
“Gus—isn’t mine.” His voice came out far more hoarse and heartbroken than he’d intended. He had no right to grieve the loss of a blood relation to a baby he’d known for a matter of minutes (even if it had only taken a matter of minutes for him to fall in love with the boy and with the idea of being his father). Still, his tear ducts stung.  
  
Annie’s eyes were cast downward and askance; now that the truth was out, she couldn’t even look at Bertolt’s face. “Biology isn’t everything,” she said. “On a strictly biological basis, Reiner isn’t August Leonhart’s son. And Lacie Reiss isn’t Ymir’s daughter. It doesn’t really matter.”  
  
Reiner put his hand on Bertolt’s shoulder and said, in a reassuring tone, “If it makes you feel any better, I’m not Gus’ biological father either.” There was something vaguely familiar about the comment that actually did make Bertolt feel a tiny bit better. “And biological fathers don’t always make for good dads,” Reiner continued. “Mine and yours being prime examples.”  
  
In the car, after they’d resolved their anxieties, Reiner had shared the story of his birth with Bertolt. It was a tale Reiner had waited years to hear from his mother, and Bertolt had been impressed by how unperturbed Reiner was as he retold it. His genetic father, it turned out, was a violent, emotionally unstable, drug abusing German artist. When Bertolt had said he was sorry that the truth was so harsh, Reiner had looked at him bemusedly and said, “What’s there to be sorry for? I got genes for being handsome and creative without ever having to meet the guy. And I must be super lucky because I wound up with an amazing dad.” Here Reiner had given Bertolt a sympathetic smile. “I just wish you could’ve had the same luck, Bertl.”  
  
It was true that paternity and fatherhood were not always packaged together. But Gus’ biological father wasn’t necessarily a creep or a loser. If he was just an ordinary guy that Annie had dated, couldn’t he claim the right to be in his son’s life? The thought made Bertolt’s stomach twist queasily and though he knew broaching the subject was invasive at best, he had to know.  
  
“Gus’ biological father—” he began, and stopped, unable to go through with it. Annie was still looking away, as if in shame. She had nothing to be ashamed of, at least in his eyes. It wasn’t as if she’d been unfaithful to him.  
  
“His biological father isn’t a matter we’ll ever need to worry about,” she said. “Since the day Gus was born, Reiner has gone beyond the duties of a mere uncle and acted as a second parent to him. Reiner feeds him and changes his diapers and plays with him and loves him just as much as I do.”  
  
Reiner bobbed his head proudly. “It’s true. Especially the feeding part. I’ve always been the master of meal time.”  
  
At this, Annie shot a sardonic look towards her brother. “Always? Funny, I don’t recall any breast milk ever coming out of those rock hard pecs of yours. And just for the record, shouting through the baby monitor, ‘Hey sis, I think it’s time to give baldy your tit!’ was not as helpful as you think.”  
  
“Uh, I think we may have gotten somewhat off topic,” said Reiner and Annie conceded with a sigh.  
  
“The point is,” she said, “Gus’ biological father isn’t going to come after him. In every way that matters, Reiner is his father.” Now, at last, she looked directly at Bertolt, and the expression she wore was not one of shame but fierce, steely hope. “But I was considering expanding the position to make it a two-man operation.”  
  
“You mean—you would let me be Gus’ father?” Bertolt asked. “Even though I’m not his _father_?”  
  
“Only if it’s what you want.” The pitch of Annie’s voice wavered almost imperceptibly as she said it, evidence of the effort it was taking for her to sound so calm. “You need to know that you are under no obligation to us, Bertl. But if you want the job, it’s yours.”  
  
Bertolt looked at Gus, who had overcome his shyness enough to show his face and was now watching this tall stranger with wide, curious eyes. Annie’s eyes. He grinned, and even though he only had four teeth, Gus’ grin was remarkably like Reiner’s—must’ve learned it through imitation. Bertolt was overwhelmed by a tidal wave of love. Discovering that Gus was not his biological son hadn’t diminished Bertolt’s affection for him in the slightest. Gus was Annie’s son, and—as Annie said, in every way that mattered—he was Reiner’s son, too. And it was obvious from the way they both looked at him that he was the center of their world.  
  
Something Reiner said in the car suddenly came back to Bertolt with fresh understanding: _“—now that I think about it, there is this one boy we’re both kind of crazy about—”_ How could Bertolt not be crazy about this boy, too? Annie was giving him a choice, but the answer was obvious, just like it must have been for the other August Leonhart when he met baby Reiner for the first time.  
  
“Of course I want the job,” Bertolt said.  
  
“Yeah,” said Reiner, hugging him from the side. “We kind of knew that you would.”  
  
Annie hoisted Gus off of her hip and held him in front of her using both of her arms. “Would you like to hold him?” she asked.  
  
Without a moment’s hesitation, Bertolt reached out and took Gus—his son with Annie and Reiner—and cradled the boy in his arms. The feeling it gave him was indescribable, at once frightening and wonderful and peaceful and at least a dozen other emotions that shouldn’t be able to exist simultaneously in one person.  
  
He could do this, though. He _was_ good enough, and he _wasn’t_ too damaged. Annie and Reiner loved him. They believed in him. And so did Ma. Ma had worked so hard to become a better mother for him and he realized now that fixing his relationship with her would help make him a better father.  
  
“You know,” he said, speaking to Reiner and Annie while still looking at Gus’ cherubic face. “I thought about you two every day that I was in prison. I wondered how you were doing and what kinds of lives you were living. And I prayed that when I got out, you two would still want to share your lives with me, because every night I dreamed about coming home to you. But I never imagined anything like this.”  
  
“We understand that it’s a big adjustment,” said Reiner softly, faintly worried.  
  
“You can take your time getting to know him,” said Annie. “Ease into it.”  
  
Bertolt nuzzled the tip of his nose against the tip of Gus’ and earned a fit of giggles from the boy. “No,” Bertolt said gently. “I’ve been away for too long and missed too much already. I think I’d rather dive in head first.”  
  
  
  
Annie awoke to a potpourri of mouthwatering breakfast smells—eggs, bacon, pancakes (possibly waffles, less likely crepes), and coffee—drifting up from the kitchen, which meant that Bertolt was already up and about. Not really a surprise on a special day like today. Actually, since he’d joined the household nearly a year ago, Bertolt was almost always the first to rise. Oversleeping Reiner was a far less common occurrence; usually on mornings after they’d all slept cuddled together in the master bed, she would wake up while her brother was still snoring. And if anyone thought that sharing a bed with her gay brother and their mutual boyfriend was aberrant then it was a good thing they didn’t know about it. Today she found herself cocooned in linens all alone, though she supposed Reiner could have simply slunk back to his own bed the last time he went to use the bathroom.  
  
Sitting up and stretching her arms above her until her shoulders popped, Annie decided that she didn’t care if she was the last one up. It’s not like she had any classes—to teach or to take—today. She’d secured this day off months in advance. What a curious twist that February Fourteenth, a holiday she’d long despised for its commercialization, monetization, and impersonalization of one of the most quintessential of human emotions, was now her favorite day of the year.  
  
Her stomach let out a loud, bullfroggy croak and she swung her feet down to the floor, eager to eat the breakfast Bertolt made, but even more eager to see the birthday boy. A cursory glance into Gus’ bedroom—his big kid bed an empty nest of rumpled dinosaur sheets and stuffed animals—confirmed what Annie already suspected, that her little early bird was in the kitchen with Daddy-B. Clad in her standard nighttime garb of gym shorts and one of Bertolt’s t-shirts, she headed downstairs.  
  
All three boys were assembled in the kitchen: Gus in his booster seat, laughing exuberantly as Reiner made faces at him across the table (both of them neglecting their food), and Bertolt swooping around from the cooking area to deliver a steaming platter of breakfast in front of Annie’s waiting seat.  
  
“Annie!” Gus crowed when he saw her arrive. “Morny Annie! Daddy-B make pa’cakes!” He picked up a pancake from his plate and flapped it in the air in front of him to show her. There was a number 2 baked into the center; Bertolt was seriously stepping up his stay-at-home dad game.  
  
“Morning, Kewpie doll,” Annie said, ruffling his dark hair and kissing his forehead before slipping into her usual chair.  
  
The dramatic frown Gus’ shot her—all puffed lower lip and beetled brow—reminded her so much of the photos she’d seen of her younger self that she couldn’t help but smile.  
  
“I not Coopy, I Gus,” he said adamantly.  
  
Annie cocked an eyebrow. “Is that so? Well, in that case, I’m not Annie, I’m Mommy.” Not once in his short life had her son called her any variation of a word for mother, and Annie was starting to suspect he never would.  
  
At this, Gus cracked a grin. “Annie funny.”  
  
“You wouldn’t even know what a Kewpie is if it weren’t for the mayonnaise,” said Reiner, talking through a smirk around a mouthful of French toast. “You weren’t exactly the kind of girl who played with dolls as a kid.”  
  
Annie just rolled her eyes and let it slide, turning her attention down to her plate. “Bertl, I think you may have gone a little overboard,” she said, gazing down at scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, hash browns, yogurty fruit salad, French toast, and a short stack of pancakes shaped like hearts.  
  
“You think so?” Bertolt untied his apron and hung it on a hook, then joined them at the table with his own plate of (notably less elaborate) breakfast in hand. Two fried eggs and two slices of whole wheat toast were all he’d made for himself. As soon as he’d sat, he leaned over and kissed Annie. “You don’t have to eat everything. You were still in bed and I didn’t know what you’d be in the mood for, so I made it all just in case.”  
  
“I can see that,” she said, though not in a critical tone.  
  
“It’s my first Valentine’s Day spent with you guys as a family,” he said. “You’ll have to forgive me if I get a little carried away.”  
  
Reiner reached out and patted Bertolt on the shoulder. “Darling, we’ve been prepared for this since Christmas.”  
  
“And! And! And!” Gus chanted, pumping his fists, which clutched blunt, child-sized knife and fork.  
  
“Oh wait,” said Annie, scrunching her forehead and rubbing her chin as if she were deep in thought. “Wasn’t there something else happening today? A birthday or something? But who would have his birthday on Valentine’s Day?”  
  
“Ooh! Ooh!” Gus hooted excitedly.  
  
“I don’t know,” said Bertolt, failing horribly at suppressing his grin as he played along.  
  
Reiner couldn’t keep from smiling, either. “I guess nobody is turning two today after all.”  
  
“Me! Me! Me! Me!”  
  
Annie, who’d always had the best poker face of the trio, looked at her squealing son coolly and tilted her head to the side. “No, it’s not Mimi’s birthday. I don’t think we even know somebody named Mimi.”  
  
By now Gus’ face was mottled pink with frustration. “Not Mimi! Me! Gus! Gus bird-day! I two!”  
  
“You mean today is _your_ birthday, Gus?” Annie said, mouth wide in feigned surprise.  
  
“Yesh!” he declared triumphantly. “I two!”  
  
Bertolt let out a theatrical gasp. “Two? Why that’s a very important age! I think this calls for a party!”  
  
“And a cake!” added Reiner.  
  
“Yay! Bird-day cake!” Gus threw his arms up in the air in elation, flinging his fork and knife onto the floor behind him.  
  
And Annie got a tight feeling in her chest. As much as her son’s pouts and scowls resembled her’s, his joyful expressions reminded her so much of his father. Though his father was not given to such ebullient displays as this—that man’s happiness was of a gentler sort—the way Gus’ eyes sparkled was uncannily familiar. No sight in the world was more beautiful to Annie than her little boy’s smile, but she still could not escape the pangs of regret it brought.  
  
Not for much longer. Today was the day she would finally come clean.  
  
Though she’d always tried her best to avoid cliches, Annie couldn’t help thinking about how unbelievable it was that her baby was growing up so fast. To reckon that time flies when they’re so little, however, would not be accurate; in truth, only the time since Bertolt came home went by quickly for her. The months without him—the course of her pregnancy and the first year with Gus—had passed in fits and starts, with periods of short-lived peace followed by long weeks of anxiety and loneliness.  
  
Annie missed Bertolt far more than she ever thought she would and worried about him every day. His absence was a gaping hole through the center of her life, which nothing—not work or college or Reiner or even her precious boy—could fully close. When she needed him most, he hadn’t been there for her, and even though it wasn’t fair of her, there were days when she’d actually resented him for leaving her and Reiner. And Gus, who he hadn’t even known existed.  
  
In the weeks leading up to Bertolt’s homecoming, Annie girded her heart. Ran mental simulations of every possible thing that could go wrong. Prepared herself for a difficult adjustment and complications. Convinced herself that just because he was coming home, it didn’t mean everything would be wonderful. And she’d made a plan—a means of protection, she thought at the time—to tell Bertolt only as much as he needed to know about Gus’ birth until she felt secure in their situation.  
  
Then, two weeks ahead of schedule, Reiner brought Bertolt home, and in the face of all of Annie’s doubts, everything fell into place. Her passion for Bertolt still burned white hot (as did her brother’s), and Bertolt, in possession of a new level of personal serenity after his time in prison, still burned for both of them. He was back for good, unconditionally theirs. Most amazing of all, though, was how Bertolt immediately fell in love with Gus, and remained in love with Gus’ even after Annie had dropped the bomb of the little guy’s birthday, effectively severing any biological connection between prospective father and son.  
  
If Bertolt had ever asked her directly—and he came very close, just once, on the day he arrived home—Annie would have answered him truthfully. She never actually lied to him, merely left certain things unsaid and let him draw his own conclusions. Indeed, he drew his conclusions. And then he put them behind him and got on with living, never asking her the questions she assumed he eventually would. Things unsaid remained unsaid.  
  
Regardless of the circumstances that brought them here, they were a family, whole at last, and together their lives flourished. None of the worst case scenarios that Annie had envisioned came to fruition. Bertolt, post-incarceration, showed no signs of depression or trauma from his ordeal. In fact, he was more authentically happy than Annie had ever seen him, especially when he was with Gus. Her fear that Bertolt might relapse into drinking proved to be unfounded as well; not only did he stay sober, but he also took his mother with him to weekly AA meetings and kept her accountable.  
  
For Annie, warming up to Lynne Hoover was no easy feat. Years of verbal and psychological abuse— browbeating and denigration, muttered and screamed, heard through the thin walls between apartments or secondhand from Bertolt—were stacked in Annie’s memory like crates in a warehouse, keeping alive her first impression of Mrs. Hoover as a wicked witch. The woman earned a modicum of sympathy when she delivered her testimony at Bertolt’s hearing; she was a pitiful, broken woman, teary-eyed and weak-spirited, but (and Annie hated to admit it) sincere in her repentance and resolve to change. It was only after Bertolt announced that he was going to try to forgive his mother during his time in prison that Annie considered she might have to do the same, but still, she never had to interact with the woman until after Bertolt was out and he brought her to meet the family. Mrs. Hoover was like a completely different person—thoughtful and quiet and gentle, just like her son—and though it took no small amount of time or soul-searching, Annie had come to accept that the change was genuine.  
  
Less than a month after Bertolt’s return, Mom moved out of the townhouse and into an apartment closer to the city, and although she claimed the reason was to cut down her daily commute, Annie suspected that Mom’s primary motive was to give her children more privacy with their shared lover. From the first time Annie and Reiner explained the polyamorous situation to her, Mom was more accepting than Annie imagined most parents would be, but that didn’t mean she was comfortable living in the midst of it. It also didn’t mean Mom was free from concerns—never voiced, but plain on her face—over how this nontraditional family would fare in the long run.  
  
Annie had worries, too. They hadn’t had time prior to Bertolt’s departure to really consider the practical side of making an intimate relationship between three people work, and upon his return—having waited for so long already—they simply jumped into it headlong. And it worked. Somehow, miraculously, this arrangement just clicked. Annie and Bertolt became lovers once again. Reiner and Bertolt became lovers once again. And there was no jealousy or rivalry between brother and sister; they remained best friends and partners, dual breadwinners for the family while Bertolt joyously embraced the life of a full-time parent.  
  
Bertolt had his own bedroom in the basement, but he rarely used it except to store his books. Most nights he slept in Reiner’s bed or in Annie’s bed (which, being the only king-sized bed in the house, sometimes accommodated all three of them). Occasionally, Annie peered into Gus’ room in the middle of the night to check up on him, only to find Daddy-B curled protectively around the boy, his long legs dangling far off the edge of the big kid bed and onto the floor. It was incredible how well Bertolt slept these days, and that was one of the key pieces of evidence that let Annie know he truly was happy. Everyone in the household was satisfied, mentally, emotionally, and physically. And they all adored and doted upon Gus.  
  
It was all so perfect.  
  
Too perfect.  
  
Nothing in this world terrified Annie quite so much as perfection. Perfect happiness. Perfect peace. Perfect love. Merely entertaining the idea that everything was going smoothly in the life they shared was invitation for disaster as far as she was concerned. And that was why she’d kept the truth about her son’s paternity hostage all this time. Sick and twisted though it was, Annie needed to have something bitter buried inside her to justify all the sweetness and bliss in her life. She may have overcome the worst of her fear of emotional attachments, but she still wasn’t ready to shed the last layer of protection around her heart.  
  
Ready or not, though, she had made a vow—not only to herself, but to Reiner, who would definitely hold her to it—that today would be the day. She was going to tell Bertolt everything she’d been holding back.  
  
“Tha’ one! Tha’ one!” Even though twin crescents of pancake remained uneaten on his plate, it was clear that Gus was done with his breakfast as he pointed a syrupy finger at the iPad Bertolt held in front of him.  
  
“Do you mean the big cake or the cupcakes?” Likewise, Bertolt had left a v-shaped crust behind, not because he didn’t like the crust, but because he was too excited over Gus’ birthday cake to finish eating.  
  
Gus’ pondered the question for a half-second before shouting his answer: “Cub-cakes!”  
  
“And what color frosting do you like?” asked Reiner—Daddy-R (or as Gus said it, Daddy-Awe)—as he reached his arm across the table to spear Gus’ leftover scraps on his fork. When Reiner was around, no food got wasted.  
  
“Byoooo! I yike byoooo!”  
  
“Then blue it is,” said Bertolt. “Do you like sprinkles?”  
  
Reiner craned his neck to see the iPad screen. “Ooh! Show him the one with the sharks!”  
  
Annie sighed affectionately at her trio of rambunctious boys. “I think you three plus Pinterest is a dangerous combination. I mean, all that really matters is that they taste delicious, right?”  
  
“Cupcakes can still be delicious and have shark tails and fins sticking out of the top,” said Reiner. “Our Bertl can do it. Remember the bûche de Noël?”  
  
He had a point—Bertolt’s talents in the kitchen never ceased to amaze. “Just as long as you don’t stress out over it,” she told Bertolt. “Keep in mind that he’s going to make a mess of them in the end.” Then she turned to her brother. “So, Reiner, have you finished putting together the T-R-I-C-Y-C-L-E?”  
  
“Not yet,” said Reiner, leaning back in his seat, unconcerned. “I’ll get on it after we clean up the kitchen. Shouldn’t take me long, though. I mean, how hard could it be?”  
  
Annie gave him a dubious look.  
  
“I’ll take care of the kitchen,” said Bertolt. “Since I am the one who made the mess.”  
  
“All the more reason for us to do it,” said Annie. “You made us breakfast so we’ll clean up.”  
  
Bertolt smiled appreciatively. “Well in that case, I think I’ll take Gus-Gus upstairs to wash his birthday suit before Grammy and Nana come over.”  
  
Gus scrunched his (slightly oversized but in the cutest way) nose and said. “What a bird-day suit?”  
  
“It means you’re getting a bath, you little monkey.” Reiner said it in a teasing way, but they all knew Gus loved baths. Once Bertolt had carried off their already overstimulated birthday boy, Reiner put on a serious expression to address his sister. “You’re still planning on telling him, right?”  
  
“I said that I would,” she said, pushing her chair out from the table. “So I will.” No matter how anxious she felt, she had no intention of backing out. She would rather do it without Reiner breathing down her neck, ideally, but she had involved him in this from the start so it really couldn’t be helped.  
  
“Are you scared?” he asked.  
  
“Of course I am. After vowing not to have secrets from each other anymore, to reveal that I’ve kept this one for so long—I don’t know how Bertl will react. And then there’s the secret itself. I’m surprised you are scared, Reiner.”  
  
Reiner snorted dismissively. “Why would I be scared?”  
  
“Because once Bertolt knows the truth it might change the dynamics between us,” Annie suggested.  
  
“Naw,” said Reiner, shaking his head. “I’m not scared. And you shouldn’t be either, sis. At least not about the truth changing anything. It won’t. Bertolt loves Gus as his own even without a clue who the kid’s biological father is and he’ll still love the kid just as much after you tell him. As for him being hurt over you keeping secrets—you have a good defense in the fact that you never actually lied to him, and if you just carefully explain your reasons, I’m sure he’ll understand.”  
  
Annie kept her eyes averted as she picked up her empty coffee mug and silverware and set them on top of her plate. “My reasons don’t even sound reasonable to me anymore. I don’t really think Bertolt will be upset by the truth. But still, I have this dread in the pit of my stomach when I think about telling him.”  
  
Moving with unexpected swiftness, Reiner came up behind her and put his strong arms around her shoulders. “I know,” he said quietly. “And I know what it is you’re really scared of.”  
  
She twisted around in his loose embrace and raised an eyebrow in his face. “Oh really?”  
  
“Yeah really,” he said, his tone more challenging than smug. “You’re afraid that he won’t even care and once your last secret is out your life will be damn near perfect.”  
  
He was right, of course, so she couldn’t speak any objections, but she frowned severely and said, “So?”  
  
“You’re afraid of what might happen if you let yourself be too happy, aren’t you?”  
  
Annie’s mouth smoothed out into a hard, thin line. Again, she said, “So?,” but this time softly, not defiantly. “So what if I am? It’s not that crazy a fear.”  
  
Now it was Reiner’s turn to cock an eyebrow. “I don’t know. I think I’d put ‘too much happiness’ pretty high on the list of crazy phobias.”  
  
“You know it’s not _too much happiness_ that scares me,” she said.  
  
“Right,” said Reiner sympathetically. “It’s the inevitable catastrophe that you’re convinced will occur if your happiness goes over a certain limit. But Annie, that kind of thinking is crazy. You’re smart enough to see that.”  
  
“Yeah, but smarts don’t always come out on top when up against past experiences. The last time I thought everything was going to be okay, the man I— _we_ —love wound up in prison for a year and a half. Before that, I lost a pregnancy I very much wanted, and before that, I lost my favorite person in the world.”  
  
“So you’ve had some shitty luck. All of us have. But whatever is going to happen will happen. I don’t mean to sound bleak, but the bad shit is always going to find a way in. When you close all the doors, it’s only the good stuff you wind up shutting out. So you might as well open yourself to every good thing that comes your way.”  
  
Annie rolled her eyes and sighed heavily. “You know I hate it when you say something wise. Especially since I’m the only one of us in college.” Reiner pouted and she reassured him with a smile. “But I am glad that I heard it. I needed that, big brother.”  
  
“Any time,” he said and pulled her into a tight hug. “And not to put a jinx on it, but I think all of us have used up our lifetime allotment of shitty luck and there are far more good times ahead of us than bad.”  
  
“I’d like to believe that, too,” said Annie. Released from Reiner’s arms, she picked up her plate to resume clearing the table.  
  
“Don’t worry about that,” said Reiner, waving his hand. “I’ll take care of everything in here. You go on up and be with your little bathing beauty. I know you want to.”  
  
“I’m not having the talk with Bertl until after the party, you know,” she told him.  
  
Reiner smirked. “I know. Remember, I have my part to play, too.”  
  
“Right.” Skipping the formality of insisting she stay and help, Annie set down her plate and went straight for the stairs. She paused on the landing that overlooked the kitchen, though, and told her brother, “Thank you.”  
  
In the bathroom upstairs, Gus was still splashing in the tub, surrounded by bubbles and plastic sea creatures, and gave no indication of being ready to get out. Bertolt, his sleeves rolled up, was doing his best to get some actual shampoo in the boy’s hair, but not having much success since Gus was slippery and wiggly as an otter.  
  
“Let Daddy-B wash your hair, baby,” she said, stepping over to tub and kneeling next to Bertolt. It still struck her as bizarre just how much she enjoyed simple domestic moments like this. Sure she loved all the myriad joys of martial arts, especially her new women’s self-defense class—there was just something so satisfying about teaching a woman how to take down an attacker more than twice her size—but there was something to be said for family time.  
  
With two out of three parents on the scene, Gus must have gotten the sense that he needed to cooperate because he sat still enough for them to actually clean him. Damn it was ridiculous how much she loved this boy.  
  
“Hard to believe he’s really two,” said Bertolt. “I haven’t been around for even half of it, but I still think it’s incredible. And I know I say this a lot, Annie, but he looks just like you.”  
  
“Maybe in the eyes,” she said.  
  
“And the nose,” said Bertolt. “He’s got your cute nose. He really is a miracle.”  
  
“That he is,” said Annie. _Bertolt, you have no idea_ , she thought. _But you will._  
  
  
Gus’ birthday party was more of a family luncheon than an actual party. Annie, already dreading future events that would surround her with shrieking, screaming, barfing brats, relished it. She may be crazy about Gus, but that didn’t mean she had any warm feelings for kids in general. This might be Gus’ last peaceful birthday for years.  
  
The menu included all the birthday boy’s favorite foods: macaroni and cheese, green beans from a can, cut up hot dogs, and sliced strawberries. Nana (Leonhart) brought one of those edible arrangements with the flowers made from cut and chocolate-dipped fruit. And Grammy (Hoover), in coordination with her son’s cupcakes, brought supplies for a kid-friendly drink called a shark attack, which involved dropping a plastic shark filled with grenadine into a glass of Sprite (milk for the two-year old). Gus thought it was brilliant.  
  
Reiner did get the tricycle together (though it had taken him a full hour), and after lunch they all went outside for a spin around the block. Then it was back home for cupcakes. Throughout all of it, Nana was snapping photos from every angle with her digital camera, which prompted Bertolt to ask, in jest, why there were so few photos from his infancy. The question made Annie’s stomach lurch for a split-second before Bertolt got distracted and forgot all about it. By the time his two grandmothers kissed him goodbye, Gus was fast asleep in an armchair, his face and hands and clothes a veritable Willem de Kooning painting of blue frosting and red grenadine.  
  
“Is it okay if I clean him up and put him to bed?” Bertolt asked. “Or did one of you want the honor?”  
  
“Go right ahead,” said Annie. It was just about truth time, now, and her nerves were electrified with anticipation.  
  
“I guess we should go get our Valentine’s Day presents for our beloved,” Reiner said. He sounded anxious, but Annie chose not to say anything.  
  
Just as she was about to mount the stairs, there was a knock on the front door and Annie went to answer it. Outside was a woman bearing the embroidered logo of a private courier service on her cap and polo shirt who held out an electronic pad and pen for Annie to sign. Upon completion of her signature, Annie was handed a package roughly the size of a toaster oven and the courier woman left with a salute and a, “Have a nice evening!”  
  
“What is it?” Reiner asked as Annie closed the door.  
  
“It’s a box.”  
  
“Well obviously. From who?”  
  
She read the return address on the box silently and had to stifle a noise of exasperation. “From ‘Your Fairy Godlesbians plus Princess Lacie,’” she said. “They actually wrote it out just like that. And apparently we are ‘The Hoover-Braun-Leonhart Family’ with ‘Burly, Longshanks, Frosty and Peewee’ in parentheses.”  
  
“It’s probably a birthday present for Gus,” said Reiner. “But we shouldn’t open it without Bertolt. Bring it up.”  
  
Upstairs they found Bertolt standing just outside of Gus’ bedroom, leaning on the doorjamb as he watched his son.  
  
“We got a package from Ymir and Historia,” Annie whispered.  
  
Hearing this, Bertolt spun around, his eyes wide with interest. “We did? When?”  
  
“Just now.” Annie observed his face curiously. “Why? Have you been expecting something?”  
  
Bertolt’s face bloomed a dusky rose and he scratched the back of his neck. “Kind of. Yeah. I didn’t think it would get here so soon, though. So—come to think of it—maybe it’s just a present for Gus-Gus.”  
  
“Only one way to find out,” said Reiner, plucking the box from Annie’s hands as effortlessly as if it were as small and light as a tin of Altoids. Then he expertly pulled a pokey knife from his back pocket, flicked it open, and sliced through the packing tape. “Looks like there’s two separate presents inside.” He lifted out two wrapped parcels—a larger one in jungle-print birthday paper and the other, smaller, in basic brown—and let the outer box fall to the floor.  
  
“I’m guessing the colorful one is for Gus,” said Annie. “But what about the other one.”  
  
Reiner turned the brown package, about the size of one of the last four Harry Potter books, until he found a label, or rather, a letter taped to the outside with a name written on it. “Why this would be for Longshanks,” he said and passed it over to Bertolt, who took it with both hands.  
  
Annie and Reiner watched, still and silent, as Bertolt tore open the envelope, fished out two folded pieces of paper, and scanned the first page with dancing green eyes. When he got to the end, he flipped to the second and only examined it for a second before refolding both and pressing them to his chest with a flattened hand. His eyes squeezed shut, but was it anguish or triumph?  
  
“Is it what you were hoping for?” Reiner asked cautiously, to which Bertolt responded with an elated smile.  
  
“Yes.” Now Bertolt shifted his focus to the package, slipping his fingers under the paper to peel it back delicately. Annie kept her eyes on the mysterious item, waiting for the reveal, but after opening just one end, Bertolt’s hands stilled and he looked up. “Do you two remember when I told you that idea about writing a memoir? It was only a week or so after I came home—kind of a while ago—so you might not. But you said you thought it was a really good idea.”  
  
“I remember,” said Annie. “And I still think it is a good idea.” She could already sense what he was going to announce, the excitement rising like a bubble in her chest.  
  
With a flourish, Bertolt tore away the brown paper to reveal two identical books—paperbacks—which he handed to Reiner and Annie.  
  
“ _Dream Runner_ ,” Annie read aloud from the cover. “A memoir, by Bertolt Hoover.” Her eyes jumped back up to meet Bertolt’s. “You did it. You really wrote it. And now it’s a real book. Bertolt, that’s incredible.”  
  
“It’s not quite a book yet,” he admitted, the pink in his face deepening. “It will be. Soon. But those are just pre-publication copies from Ymir’s editor, Nanaba. I don’t remember her last name but she graciously volunteered to edit my book even though I didn’t have a deal yet. I told Ymir that if it sold, I wanted a pair of copies before it went to print so that you two could be the first to read it. I mean, besides me. And Ymir and Nanaba, of course. And probably Historia.”  
  
“So a publisher has already bought your book?” Reiner asked, audibly thrilled. “They’re going to sell it in stores and Amazon and everything? That’s unbelievable!”  
  
“I probably _wouldn’t_ believe it if it weren’t for this check.” Bertolt held out the papers from the envelop. One was a letter of congratulations and publisher information, and the other was a check—for what Annie would call an impressive sum of money—made out to Bertolt Hoover. “I really want you guys to read the book,” he said. “Before it goes on shelves, I need to know that you’re okay with everything that’s in there. There’s nothing lewd or bad about either one of you, of course. But you are pretty central figures in my life, so, uh, you’re featured in my memoir a lot. I got permission from everyone else—Connie and Sasha, Jean and Marco, the trio from Warehouse 104 in Philly—but your approval is most important to me. Always.”  
  
Annie and Reiner both turned at the same time and looked at each other, wordlessly exchanging thoughts, the way they did when they were little. _Does he seriously think we’d disapprove of anything he wrote about us?_  
  
 _That’s our Bertolt. Guess we better show him that we are nothing but over-the-moon proud of him._  
  
In perfect symmetry, brother and sister swooped in and wrapped their arms around Bertolt.  
  
“We’ll read it,” Annie assured him. “We will absolutely read your book. I’m sure whatever you wrote about us is just fine if it came from your heart.”  
  
“We are so, so proud of you,” said Reiner. He loosened his hold so he could take another look at the book while Annie continued to cling. Then he gave Bertolt a kiss on the mouth and said, “What a wonderful Valentine’s Day gift for you to give to us.”  
  
Annie’s insides squirmed like a bucket of live eels. How could she segue this moment of celebration for Bertolt’s achievement into the weighty confession she had to make to him?  
  
“No, no,” Bertolt said in an apologetic tone. “That’s not a Valentine’s Day gift. I was going to give you copies of the book anyways, whenever— _if ever_ —they came. It’s just coincidence that it was on Valentine’s Day. And now that I’ve got this check, I can buy both of you real gifts, albeit belated. Reiner, I’ll get you any hiking or camping equipment you want. Or we can go to the comic book store and I’ll treat you to a huge stack of X-Men graphic novels. Annie, I’ll buy you new running shoes. Or a charm for your bracelet. Or both. Whatever you guys want, that’s what I’ll get you for Valentine’s Day.”  
  
Ah, and here was just the opening Annie needed; she had to take it, even at the risk of dragging the mood of the evening into the depths of seriousness. “You don’t have to give us anything,” she said, looking up into Bertolt’s face as her arms held in a loop around his slender middle. Big breath. “After all, you already gave us the greatest Valentine’s Day gift ever two years ago.” Her gaze flicked, hummingbird quick, over to her brother and caught his tiny nod of approval for her tactic before returning to Bertolt, who looked flattered but confused.  
  
“Two years ago I was in prison and you were having—” He paused, a light of comprehension sparking on in his eyes, and gestured towards the door behind him with a bob of his chin. “You mean Gus-Gus? It’s very generous of you to give me partial credit for that kid, but I really had nothing to do with it.” Then he smiled down at Annie with so much sweetness it made her chest throb and said, “That miracle was all you. Well, and I guess, uh, his biological father.” The last sentence came out mumbled, evincing that it was still a difficult subject for him to speak of.  
  
Annie sighed. “You know, for such literary-minded person, your ability to read between the lines could use some work.”  
  
“Think hard about what she said, Bertl,” Reiner said, sidling closer.  
  
Bertolt blinked at Reiner and then down at Annie. “I’m sorry. I don’t get it.”  
  
“Bertolt,” she said, voice soft and steady even though her stomach was quivering. “ _You_ are Gus’ biological father. He’s yours.”  
  
Green eyes went wide. “He’s mine? But—how? We were only— _together_ —that last night. And that was in August. Gus was born in February. The timeline doesn’t work. Unless—today isn’t really his birthday.”  
  
Under the heat of Bertolt’s imploring gaze, sweat bubbled on Annie’s forehead. She took a step back, hands withdrawing smoothly from around his waist to take one of his hands. “Come with me. I have something to give you that will make it easier to explain.” She led him into her master bedroom and Reiner followed, and while the two of them sat down on the edge of the bed, she went into her closet to retrieve the Valentine’s Day present she’d had made for Bertolt.  
  
“What’s this?” Bertolt asked when she placed the big square book in his hands.  
  
“That,” said Annie, sinking down onto the bed next to him, “is Gus’ baby album. Today you asked why there weren’t more pictures from when Gus was an infant. And the answer is that there _are_ pictures, it’s just—well, they can be a bit difficult to look at so we don’t keep them out on display. But I had this album made because I wanted you to see them, Bertolt.”  
  
Bertolt skimmed his hand over the cover of the album, which was basic black with a small picture—two itty-bitty footprints, dark on white—inlaid at its center. An outsider (and perhaps Bertolt right now) might guess that the image size had been reduced for aesthetic purposes, but Annie and Reiner knew it was to scale. Just below the picture, embossed in curling silver script, was the name, _August Reiner Leonhart_ , and his birthdate, _February 14th, 2017_.  
  
Annie held her breath as Bertolt opened the album to the front page, revealing one of the first photographs ever taken of Gus, wrinkled and pink and impossibly small in his clear plastic isolette, tubes and wires attached to his fragile body with medical tape. Bertolt touched the image with fingertips, as delicately as he would an actual premature infant.  
  
“This is Gus?”  
  
Seeing that photograph for the first time in months stirred Annie’s memories in vivid, emotional detail. The full experience of what she—and Reiner, for that matter—went through, wasn’t something that could be truly conveyed to Bertolt in just words and pictures, but she would try. Starting from the beginning.  
  
“When I was in the emergency room in St. Louis after my accident, the doctor told me that the odds of me ever getting pregnant again without medical intervention were less than one in one-thousand. That’s why I didn’t see any need to use protection when we had sex at Ymir and Historia’s. But apparently doctors don’t know everything—or maybe it was just that one-in-a-thousand chance—because when you and I made love that night, we made Gus.”  
  
Bertolt turned to the next page, a spread of more frighteningly real, beautiful scenes. There was Annie, holding her teeny son—who even in her arms looked small, tucked into the deep folds of a swaddling blanket—her face painted starkly with love and fear that she would break him. There was Reiner, bent over the boy who was already more son than nephew to him, Gus clad only in a diaper and a blue knit cap—both far too big for him—and Reiner kissing his exposed little jelly belly.  
  
Annie continued.  
  
“I didn’t learn I was pregnant until after you were in Stohess and Reiner and I had promised not to contact you. I’d been sick for a while, but of course I didn’t consider the possibility that I could be pregnant. So I didn’t see a doctor until I got so sick I thought I might be seriously ill. When the doctor told me I was pregnant I broke down in sobs, scared out of my wits that something would go wrong.”  
  
Next pages in the album: a jump backward in time to when Annie was pregnant and Gus was just a bump underneath her hoodies. If there was an overarching theme to the photos of her from this period, it was discomfort. Not just physical discomfort—though the kid did have a knack for making her feel wretched when he was in there—but also the constant fear that something horrible would happen because even the doctors couldn’t say for sure how her pregnancy would progress. In one photo, she was flanked by Ymir and Historia, who both grinned while she sat tight-lipped and awkward, a hand on her round, overall-covered belly. They had flown all the way from California to give Annie an impromptu baby shower, caught up in a maternal reverie after finding out their artificial insemination had been successful.  
  
“Things did go wrong,” said Annie. “Right from the start. For the first several months, my morning sickness was so bad that I lost weight when I was supposed to be gaining. And due to the extensive scar tissue on my uterus, the placenta attached in the wrong place and Gus grew in an unusual position. When I went in for my three-month ultrasound, the doctor couldn’t find a heartbeat, which we’d heard the last time, and I thought—” She choked on the words as her hand instinctively reached for Reiner’s, which had held it so tightly that day. “Well, I’m sure you can imagine what I thought. They did another—less pleasant—kind of ultrasound and did find a heartbeat, but after that I was always bracing myself for the worst.”  
  
“Oh my god,” Bertolt uttered softly. “I am so sorry, Annie. I had no idea what you were going through. If I had known—”  
  
Annie shook her head, sighing. “If you had known, it wouldn’t have made a difference. You’d still be in prison but you would’ve been all worked up on my behalf, rattling the bars and unable to sleep. I won’t lie—I did agonize over whether or not I should break our promise and let you know I was pregnant. Reiner advocated for it, pointing out how horrible I’d felt about keeping the other pregnancy a secret from you for so long. But I remembered the reason you gave for not wanting to see us and I wanted to spare you the misery of feeling trapped and unable to help. And besides that, things were so chancy. If I lost the baby, I didn’t want you to have to deal with that on top of everything else—not until we were in a position to actually comfort each other. So I decided to just wait.”  
  
The next spread featured a timeline of ultrasound photos—Annie got more than most women because of the high-risk nature of her pregnancy—which documented Gus’ prenatal development, from a jellybean-shaped blob to something distinctively fetal. On the last photo of the series, a circle had been drawn around a tiny white protuberance from the lower belly along with the words “It’s a boy!!!” written in Reiner’s hand. Of course she and Reiner both would’ve loved a little girl just as much, but Annie had secretly been hoping for a boy.  
  
“Faced with such uncertainty, I tried not to get too attached, but I couldn’t help it. And neither could Reiner. The baby growing inside of me was a lingering piece of the man both of us loved and longed for and missed so badly. Just thinking about having your baby, Bertolt—well, in a way it was like having you back with us. After the holidays passed without incident, I started to feel optimistic. But in mid-January I began to have cramps and spotting and the doctor ordered me on complete bed rest, which, for an active person like me, was a nightmare.”  
  
“Also a nightmare for the big brother you bossed around as an outlet for your frustration,” said Reiner. “Just saying.”  
  
Annie gave him a withering look and went on. “But even bed rest could only keep that kid in for so long. At two in the morning on Valentine’s Day, I woke up to bloody sheets and the most excruciating pain I had ever felt in my life. I will never forget the look of terror in Reiner’s eyes when he burst into my bedroom and saw all that red. But scared as he was, he didn’t hesitate to scoop me up in his arms, put me in the backseat of the car with Mom, and drive straight to the emergency room.”  
  
The events of that day existed as dark, vague blurs in Annie’s memory, but through the simple act of telling, they came back to her with a clarity she never expected to recapture and her heart began to pound in her chest. “I remember being so sure that I was losing the baby—or had already lost it—but the doctor told me that at thirty-one weeks I wasn’t losing the baby, I was _having_ the baby. She said that he would be small, but if he was anything like his mother, he would do just fine. It’s funny—throughout my pregnancy, that was something people always said to reassure me, that my baby was sure to thrive because he was strong like me. But that’s not how I saw it. I thought my baby must be strong like his father, who was able to grow up gentle and sweet in a toxic home.”  
  
“Annie,” Bertolt mumbled, grasping for her hand.  
  
“Gus was like you from the very beginning, Bertl, hanging on to life even in the most inhospitable of environments. From my ruined womb to a world his body wasn’t prepared for yet. He was born by c-section, seven minutes before four in the morning, and weighed three pounds, four ounces. Reiner cried when I told him what I’d chosen as a middle name. We knew it was going to be an uphill battle, that Gus’ life was not guaranteed, but he fought like a Hoover-Braun-Leonhart, overcoming infections and setbacks. Two steps forward for every one step back. And on May seventeenth, we finally got to bring him home.”  
  
That was essentially the end of Annie’s story, but there were still more pages in the album, so from here she and Reiner just described what was going on in photos and answered questions as Bertolt asked them. On the last page was a reproduction of Gus’ birth certificate. Without an acknowledgement of paternity from Bertolt, his name couldn’t be officially listed as the father, but Annie had gone ahead and written it in by hand on her copy.  
  
“We can add your name for real,” she said quietly. “If you want.”  
  
Too nervous to look at Bertl’s face after all she’d just said, she kept her eyes on the album and saw a perfectly round drop appear on the surface of the page, then another. Bertolt tried to wipe them away with his thumb but only smeared them into a streaky comet tails. Annie threw away her fear and lifted her gaze, just in time to see another tear roll down the curved slope of his long nose. He caught this one on the back of his hand before it landed on the book.  
  
“Yeah,” he whispered. “I want that. But this doesn’t change how I feel about him. Gus was already my son.”  
  
It was the right thing for him to say and Annie knew that it was basically true, but she also knew that a biological connection was not nothing. Some people went to (what Annie considered) ridiculous lengths just to have children that were genetically their own. Paternity tests on daytime trash TV were known to move men and women alike to jubilant dancing or bitter tears. And Bertolt clearly did feel something significant or else he wouldn’t be crying. With a moist snuffle, Annie realized that she had started crying, too.  
  
“Yes,” she said. “But I think it is good for you to know that it’s true in every sense of meaning.”  
  
A couple seconds of silence and then the unescapable question: “Annie, why didn’t you tell me this when I first came home?” There wasn’t any anger in Bertolt’s tone, or even hurt, just earnest bewilderment. “I can understand why you didn’t try to contact me with the news while I was still—away—and Gus’ health was unstable. But once I was free—I just don’t understand why you let me believe some other guy had gotten you pregnant. What was the purpose?”  
  
Despite all of the time Annie had to think on it and prepare, she hadn’t come up with a perfect, easy answer to the inescapable question. “To be fair,” she said, “you never actually asked me if Gus was your child. You just jumped to that conclusion when I mentioned his birthday.” Hearing how flip this sounded, she cleared her throat and started again. “I had my reasons for not telling you, Bertolt, and at the time I made the decision they all seemed justifiable and good. I didn’t want you to feel tied down to us.”  
  
“But that’s just absurd,” Bertolt blurted out. “I’m madly in love with you and Reiner. How could I feel tied down to the people I want to spend the rest of my life with?”  
  
“We hadn’t seen or spoken to you in nineteen months,” Annie answered. “And even though I wanted to believe that your love would endure—unchanged through all of that time apart and whatever soul-searching you did—I knew I couldn’t hold you to promises and declarations you’d made before you went away. You were going to come home to a child you’d never planned on having, conceived after I had told you we were safe, and for all I knew you wouldn’t want that responsibility. In my worst fears, you blamed me, even, and resented me, but stayed out of a sense of obligation. I didn't want that. I wanted fatherhood to be a willing choice for you, like it had been for our Dad.”  
  
Bertolt nodded his head shallowly as he processed all of this, then ran the tip of his tongue over his lips before asking, “And your other reasons?”  
  
“Well that was the crux of it, really,” said Annie. “I always planned to tell you eventually. I just wanted to give you a sort of grace period you—you know, a chance for you to see how you like Gus and being a dad. This way you started out on more equal footing with Reiner and wouldn’t be afraid of stepping on his toes. And you also had an easier way out if you became overwhelmed by it all.”  
  
“I can’t even imagine wanting out,” said Bertolt.  
  
“Yes, well, unfortunately, I was in a place where I could imagine you wanting out.” Annie sighed. “Besides, I knew that telling you would mean exposing you to all this awfulness we went through without you"—she nodded down at the album—"and I wanted to give you some time to adjust to your new life before piling that on top.”  
  
“Don’t you remember what I told you in California?” Bertolt asked, but so kindly, curling his arm around Annie’s shoulders and snuggling her to his side. “Whatever makes you sad or worried or scared, I’ll carry four fifths of it.”  
  
“Actually, I believe you said three quarters,” said Annie. “But no matter the ratio, this was an emotional burden we’d already carried and shed. And thinking clearly I know you could’ve handled the story at any time. As I said, I initially thought my reasons were all good and sound, but in time I came to realize that they were at best foolish, and at worst horribly selfish. The more time passed, though, the more anxious I got about telling you.” She sucked on her lower lip as she deliberated whether or not to share Reiner’s (accurate) theory that she needed a source of anxiety because she was scared of what might happen if she let herself get too happy. No, she decided, all that mattered was overcoming it. “I’m so sorry that I waited so long, Bertl. Can you forgive me?”  
  
He turned his head and looked down at her as she looked up at him. “There’s not really anything to forgive, Annie. You did what you thought was best, not just for your own sake, but also to protect me and, most importantly, our son.” There was a new cadence of wonder to the way he said those two words. “And, as you pointed out, you never actually did lie to me. And I was dumb enough to never ask you for the identity Gus’ biological father or any other questions about his birth. I reckon if I had, you probably would’ve answered me with the truth.”  
  
“I would have,” said Annie. “That was one of the ways I rationalized withholding information, by reminding myself that you never asked for it. Reiner made me swear that if you ever did ask questions I would answer fully and honestly and not be evasive, or else he wouldn’t agree to not tell you himself.”  
  
“It wasn’t easy keeping mum on this one,” said Reiner, smiling despite having just been outed as a coconspirator. “I can’t even count the number of times I’ve wanted to gush about how adorable that boy is and attribute it to the fact that he’s the perfect combination of my darling little sister and the love of my life.”  
  
“It doesn’t bother you in any way that I’m his father by blood?” Bertolt asked.  
  
Reiner made a _pfft_ sound through his teeth. “Sure it would’ve been poetic for your situation with regard to Gus to mirror my dad’s situation with regard to me. But the way things turned out is pretty awesome. I mean, the man I love is my son’s father. What could be more wonderful than that?”  
  
Annie watched as a dreamy look came onto Bertolt’s face and he uttered in awe, “I’m Gus’ actual, biological father. I am my son’s father.”  
  
Giving him a good squeeze with her arm hooked behind his back, Annie made a suggestion she knew wasn’t far from his mind. “Would you like to go and say goodnight to him again, Daddy-B?” _And look at him with fresh eyes_ , she thought, knowing that Bertolt wouldn’t be able to help searching for traces of himself in Gus’ face and mannerisms from now on.  
  
“Yes, let’s all go,” said Bertolt. He closed the album and when he stood up, set it down in the spot he’d vacated.  
  
Annie stood, too, and so did Reiner, the birthday present from Ymir and Historia still in his clutches. “Before we go in, I’m opening this up,” he said. “I can’t take the curiosity any longer.” He have the package a vigorous shake, causing whatever was inside to swish very softly. “I’m pretty sure it’s a stuffed animal.”  
  
“Go ahead,” Annie sighed even though her brother had already begun to shred open the jungle wrapping paper. Once it was unwrapped, he clawed his way into the box and from it pulled a very handsome plush wolf.  
  
“Looks just like Luna,” said Reiner, turning the animal around in his hands.  
  
“It looks nothing at all like Luna.” Annie took the wolf and inspected it, noticing a little yellow tag on the ear that said Steiff on it. “Luna is a rag and this looks more like a wolf.”  
  
“But Luna used to look like that,” said Reiner. “When she was brand new. Even had the yellow ear tag thingy. You really don’t remember?”  
  
Annie shook her head. “I was too little. All I know is that she was a present from Dad.”  
  
Reiner put a hand on her head and mussed her hair. “Naw. Luna was from Mom.” He didn’t give her a chance to ask for more information as he and Bertolt moved forward together on a path to Gus’ bedroom and Annie had to step lively to catch up.  
  
Gus was already sharing his bed with a diverse menagerie of stuffed animals but Annie tucked the new wolf under the blanket with him anyways. He slept so peacefully, but even so, he occasionally wound up in some odd position—like now, with his little rump sticking up in the air. He was Bertolt’s child through and through. As his three parents stood around his bed, they spoke to each other in their lowest whispers.  
  
“I can’t believe you didn’t suspect he was yours,” said Reiner. “He looks just like you.”  
  
Bertolt reached down and very delicately stroked a lock of hair off of Gus’ face. “I looked at him and I just saw Annie. Well, and you, Reiner, since your influence was already plain in his expressions.”  
  
“You should’ve seen the dumbfounded look my doctor gave me when I introduced Reiner as my brother as well as the father.”  
  
“Which more or less cleared up when I explained that my boyfriend had impregnated my sister,” said Reiner. “Because the doctor figured that Annie was our surrogate.”  
  
“And then I told her that you were my boyfriend, too, and that you were currently incarcerated. Just to get the look back again.”  
  
“I’m sorry I missed it,” said Bertolt.  
  
For a few minutes, they all just watched Gus, admiring the utter tranquility of his sleeping form, until finally Reiner spoke again. “Well Bertl darling, there’s really only one thing left for you to do.”  
  
Annie’s heart leapt up in her chest—she knew exactly where her brother was taking this and she was ready.  
  
Bertolt turned to look at Reiner, shifted to Annie, then back to Reiner. “W-what do you mean?”  
  
That was Annie’s cue. “Well,” she said. “Me and Reiner had your baby while you were in prison. We gave you nearly a year to adjust, but now we think it is time for you to take responsibility.”  
  
“Take responsibility?” Bertolt looked nonplussed. “How?”  
  
With an deft bit of footwork, Reiner simultaneously stepped in front of Bertolt and whirled around so they were face-to-face. Annie was somewhat less graceful in getting herself in position next to her brother, though she couldn’t be any more nervous than he was.  
  
“Marry us,” said Reiner, taking even Annie by surprise because she hadn’t expected him to pop the question so quickly. Did this mean he had the rings with him? Since when? She would've looked over to confirm if she’d been able to keep her eyes off of Bertolt, who looked magnificently flabbergasted.  
  
“You should take responsibility by becoming our husband,” she said very matter-of-factly. “We’d make a good wife and husband for you.”  
  
Bertolt blinked several times in rapid succession before responding. “I don’t doubt that at all. But is it even legal to marry two people?”  
  
Annie scrunched up her nose. “Of course not. Marry us anyway.”  
  
Now Reiner dropped down to one knee and held up the small, lacquered wood box which contained the other Valentine’s Day gift he and Annie had been planning for months. Feeling improper standing up for such a pivotal event but knowing she'd look like a diminutive idiot if she knelt, too, Annie sat down on Reiner’s propped up knee, which put their heads at about the same level. With one hand, she opened the lid of the box to reveal three rings, identical save for their sizes.  
  
“They’re made from titanium,” said Reiner. “Tougher than gold, silver, platinum, or even steel. Like the bonds between the three of us. So, Bertolt Hoover, will you marry us?”  
  
Tears glistened at the corners of Bertolt’s eyes, catching the glow from Gus’ rabbit-shaped nightlight. “Yes,” he said in a breaking voice. “Of course my answer is yes.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Epilogue:  
So Here We Are, In The Very Last Place That We Ever Expected To Be… And Isn’t It Magnificent?

 

The wedding happened on the first day of June, a Saturday, at the Mountain Village Bed and Breakfast, a quaint resort nestled in the rolling green hills of the Shenandoah Valley. Mom Leonhart was able to book this idyllic venue on remarkably short notice—and for a very reasonable price—due to the fact that it had just recently been bought by their old neighbor Mr. Smith (who had presumably done so in the throes of a midlife crisis because what else would compel a successful CEO to leave his investment firm to run a B&B). All it took was for her to remind Smith that a bite from his savage doberman had once sent one of the grooms to the emergency room and he’d cleared the whole weekend for the event.  
  
Three and a half months was more than enough time for everything else to come together, since the betrothed had simple tastes and wished to eschew most of the excesses common to a traditional wedding. It also helped that the guest list was very short.  
  
Eren Yeager  
Mikasa Ackerman  
Armin Arlert  
Jean Kirstein  
Marco Bott  
Connie Springer  
Sasha Blouse  
Historia & Ymir Reis (plus Lacie)  
  
Annie also invited two of her coworkers from the sport and fitness club—a busybody Zumba instructor named Hitch, and Marlo, the Prius driving do-gooder who managed the smoothie bar—mostly out of a sense of obligation, but also as part of a grudging effort to make friends at her job. And of course Moms Leonhart and Hoover would be in attendance.  
  
Every RSVP card had come back a _yes_ —even the celebrity couple, who had agreed to supply all the refreshments if they could bring along just a few extra guests. The trio had agreed, though not without some trepidation, as they knew all too well that the Reisses had a tendency to go overboard. But free food was free food—after all, WWSD?  
  
Though it had still seemed far off while they made their plans that Spring—bought suits and a dress, made playlists, wrote vows—in between the everyday business of their lives, the day arrived right on schedule. Now it was fifteen minutes before the ceremony was set to begin and Annie stood in front of a full-length mirror in her suite, making last minute adjustments to her unfussy hairstyle and no-frills dress and understated makeup. Gus, in khaki shorts and a powder blue dress shirt, sat on top of the wooden dresser eating animal crackers and kicking his bare little feet, his loyal wolf—which he’d incomprehensibly named Moon-Moon—by his side.  
  
“This is Daddy-B. And this is Daddy-Awe. And this is Annie.”  
  
That got Annie’s attention and she had to take a peek at what he was doing (she was all but done primping anyways). Lined up neatly atop his thigh, like a tiny circus procession, were three animal crackers: a giraffe, a gorilla, and a tiger.  
  
“Let me guess,” she said. “The giraffe is Daddy-B. The gorilla is Daddy-R. And that would make me—”  
  
“You a towger,” said Gus. “Cause they mean and they pwetty.”  
  
“I’m not mean,” Annie insisted.  
  
“No but you pwetty. Moon-Moon say you pwetty, too.”  
  
“Thanks, Moon-Moon,” she said and bent to give the toy a kiss. “You are a very kind wolf.”  
  
Gus’ face immediately puckered up into a jealous frown. “No fair! I wanna kiss, too!”  
  
Annie laughed at him and then happily obliged, four times: once on each cheek, once on the forehead, and the last one on the tip of his nose.  
  
“Save one of those for me,” Reiner said, letting himself into the room and closing the door behind him.  
  
With hands on her hips, Annie shot him a look of mock rebuke—mock because there was simply no covering up her good mood today—and said, “Ever heard of knocking?”  
  
“Yeah,” said Gus, imitating Annie’s tone. “Ever heard a-knocking?”  
  
“Sorry, sorry,” said Reiner. “Door was unlocked so I figured you were ready to go.”  
  
“You know it’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding,” said Annie, one corner of her mouth quirking up. “But since you aren’t _my_ groom, I think it’s probably safe.”  
  
“And you don’t believe in mumbo-jumbo like luck anyways,” Reiner pointed out. “Or traditions. In fact, I’m honestly amazed you wanted to wear a white dress. But, uh, I’m not going to criticize that decision because—” Once he’d looked at her, he couldn’t seem to look away and his speech dissolved mid-sentence. “Wow,” was the only word he could utter.  
  
“Annie bootiful,” said Gus.  
  
“The most beautiful woman in the world,” said Reiner.  
  
“Oh please.” Annie rolled her eyes and turned her head away to hide her flushed face. She’d consented to being a _June bride_ , but being a _blushing bride_ was far too trite to suit her. “You’re just saying that because I’m your sister.”  
  
Reiner stepped closer and took both her hands in his. “No, it’s true.” His voice was soft and warm and so were his hands. “That dress is even prettier than the red one Historia bought for you.”  
  
Really it was about as plain as dresses came—not even officially a wedding dress as she’d gotten it off the rack from the general collection of a department store—just a white summer dress, knee length and sleeveless. But hearing Reiner compliment her still caused a rush of giddiness. “Thank you,” she said. “And I must say you look very natty yourself, brother.” That he definitely did, dressed up in a pure white suit, white shirt, and pink tie that matched his boutonniere.  
  
“Are you scared?” Reiner asked her.  
  
“No,” she answered coolly. “Are you?”  
  
“Not at all.”  
  
They looked at each other in silence for a second and then said, in unison, “Maybe just a little.” And then they both laughed.  
  
When the mirth subsided, Reiner turned briefly serious. “It’s too bad Dad isn’t here.”  
  
“It is,” Annie quietly agreed. “But we’ll just have to take on his share of happiness in addition to our own.”  
  
Reiner’s eyebrows went up and a curious smile curled on his lips. “Never thought I’d hear you say something like that. After so many years of being afraid to allow yourself true contentment, you’ve finally given up the fight, huh?”  
  
Annie rolled her eyes but was unable to hide her smile. “Something like that. Only it was less like a surrender and more like a gradual withdrawal of forces, starting from Gus’ birthday.”  
  
It had taken a long chain of circumstances, traumas and triumphs, for Annie to finally understand that she’d been grasping at the wrong message from the tragedy of Dad’s death. For so many years she’d thought back on the pain of losing the person most important to her and carried it with her as a cautionary tale: don’t rely on anybody or get too attached to anybody, and whatever you do, don’t get too happy because life will snatch it all away.  
  
What a load of crap!  
  
Without people to rely on and love, life wouldn’t be worth living. Subsiding on momentary pleasure might be fun and seem safe, but all the best things Annie had ever experienced—the things that made her feel real and alive—were the things that lasted. A brother who would always have her back, a soon-to-be husband who was also her best friend, and a son who made her realize just how much it was possible to love another person. And the three of them would stick with her when things got tough. The real lesson of Dad’s death was that life was too short not to love with your whole heart and be joyful.  
  
“If Dad could be here today,” said Reiner, “I think he would be so, so proud of his daughter.”  
  
“And his son,” Annie said.  
  
“And Gus!” said Gus.  
  
“And Gus,” said Reiner with the gentlest of smiles. “So then, are we ready to go?”  
  
Annie hoisted her son down from the dresser and set him on the floor. Then she took hold of his hand on right and linked her elbow with Reiner’s on the left, and the three of them headed out together. “Let’s go get married to our Bertolt.”  
  
  
  
Reiner couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day to marry Bertolt Hoover. Or a more perfect setting. Gentle breezes rippled the emerald green lawn like the surface of water and carried the sweet scents of flowers down from the hills. The sky above was vast, a cloudless blue, edged with softly purple silhouettes of mountains.  
  
“Deep breath,” Annie whispered and gave his hand a squeeze.  
  
They stood side-by-side at the end of a narrow path carpeted thickly with flower petals—the aisle they were about to walk down, though there were so few guests that it really needn’t have been so long. Or maybe it looked longer than it was standing here at the end, Reiner thought. How many steps would it take them to get to where Bertolt was waiting?  
  
“You too,” he told his sister before actually following the advice and sucking in a great gulp of fresh, floral air.  
  
Then he heard their musical cue come brightly and clearly through speakers and his feet began to move before his brain realized it had told them too. Friends sat on both sides of the aisle, in folding chairs tied with bunches of white balloons, but Reiner didn’t turn to look at their faces. He was only looking ahead.  
  
Annie was on his arm, matching his gait despite the disparity in their heights. In a very small but real way, it felt wrong that Dad was not the one walking her down the aisle on her wedding day. If August Leonhart were here, would he have stood in the middle of his two children—in his police cap, perhaps—and given them both away to the same lucky man? It was impossible to know for sure. As things were, the arrangement they’d chosen was as right as any. Reiner and Annie were not giving each other away, they were taking the next step together. Just as they’d taken almost every step before together. She was his sister, his first friend, and his lifelong accomplice.  
  
Twenty-three steps brought them to the other end of the aisle.  
  
Bertolt was achingly handsome in his black suit, his dark hair fluttering on his forehead. Exultation shone in his liquid green eyes as they moved back and forth between Reiner and Annie, Annie and Reiner. Here was the sad eyed little boy who’d huddled beneath the jungle gym at recess, the little boy who’d carried so much hurt inside of him for so long but had borne it with such strength. Here was the little boy Reiner had longed for when he was a little boy himself, the little boy Reiner promised to always protect. Here was the man that little boy had grown into, strong and kind and honest and brave, the man Reiner loved more than his own life.  
  
Standing beside Bertolt was the new little boy, who loved Annie most of all and looked so much like Bertolt and had called Reiner Dada as his first word. Gus held up the silk pillow with the rings (though it was clear from the way the pillow was tipping that his wee arms were getting tired). _Just a little longer_ , Reiner mentally encouraged him. _You’re doing great, son_.  
  
Annie and Bertolt and Gus. His little family. They were all Reiner really needed, though he did love Mom and his friends as well. Long ago—or was it really all that long?—he’d thought he needed the answer to where he came from to understand who he really was and how he fit into the world. But now he knew that what made him the man he was had always been the people who loved him and he loved back.  
  
There was no priest, but that was just fine with everyone involved because they were not the religious sort and it was very unlikely that a priest would condone this unconventional marriage anyhow. Instead, the trio exchanged vows of their own authorship—simple, honest declarations of love and devotion that they’d all said to each other many times already in private. The titanium rings were bestowed much like at any other wedding, tweaked for three people: Reiner put a ring on Bertolt’s finger, Bertolt put a ring on Annie’s finger, and finally Annie put a ring on Reiner’s finger (because why shouldn’t she get to put a ring on somebody, even if it was her brother?) And there was kissing, first Reiner and Bertolt, then Bertolt and Annie. Annie and Reiner on each other’s cheeks for good measure. Gus insisted on kissing everyone and Reiner lifted him up so he could have his wish.  
  
  
  
Throughout the ceremony, Bertolt kept expecting to wake up and find himself lying askew, snarled up in bedsheets on his mattress in his old dank bedroom. Or worse, tucked into a crawlspace, three years old again having dreamed up this whole life with Annie and Reiner. He really ought to be more used to joy by now, since they had already given him so much. And it just kept coming. Now they had a son together. Now they were married. Bertolt never meant to deserve this, to deserve them.  
  
The reception took place outside, on a patch of meadow set up with small round tables, covered in bright white table cloths and festooned with flowers. There was background music pumping through rented speakers, but no dancing because there were so few people and Bertolt couldn’t dance anyways (plus this solved the problem of who he would dance with first). Instead, everyone just circulated and talked, enjoying the music and the breathtaking weather and, of course, the food.  
  
Somehow the Reisses had convinced Chef Hange Zoé to fly across the continent just to cater this strange little weddings. The spread wasn’t all bizarre molecular gastronomy fare, though, because Hange was teamed up with Ymir’s friend Ilse Langnar, the one who’d made the food for that anniversary party that felt so long ago now. Having apparently (greatly) overestimated the size of the event, the pair of them had produced dozens of enormous platters overflowing with bite-sized morsels—the food in fact took up more tables than the guests. And nobody was more happy about this than Sasha, who hovered around the platters like a bee in a garden.  
  
Then there was the cake, a four-tiered masterwork of the most colorful and intricately piped frosting Bertolt had ever seen (though he was admittedly no connoisseur of wedding cakes). Lattices of royal icing and delicately wrought spun sugar flower blossoms sprouted from the fondant covering like Rococo ornamentation. But the most stunning thing of all about this objet d’art dessert, was that the entire thing had been been made by Chef Hange’s huge, mustachioed friend, Mike, who apparently only played maître d in the evening, when he’d finished being a pâtissier during the day.  
  
Bertolt got a chance to talk to Mike; a man of few words, when thanked for providing the cake, he merely said, “I could smell you were good people when we met. Hange said you needed a cake. It made sense.”  
  
It didn’t really make sense to Bertolt, but he wouldn’t complain.  
  
The last of Ymir’s four extras was a pretty woman with short blond hair and droopy eyes, who Bertolt didn’t recognize, but realized after she introduced herself was not a complete stranger to him. It was Nanaba, Ymir’s editor, and now his as well, and she engaged him in a light discussion about the feasibility of him doing a book tour and advised him to keep writer because he had a nice style. Then she got distracted by Mike and politely excused herself.  
  
Jean wanted to know the name of “that ravishing young woman with the black hair,” which Bertolt told him was Mikasa. But as far as Bertolt saw, the only headway Jean made towards befriending any of the Philadelphia trio was with Armin, the two of them spending a good deal of the reception lost in a conversation.  
  
While mingling amongst the guests on his own (and faring better than he imagined he would being so deeply introverted), Bertolt tried to make sure he talked to everyone at least once. There was one encounter he’d been anticipating from the moment the reception began, but it didn’t happen until the revelry was well underway. He’d just stooped down to pick up Gus, who’d come to tug on his pants, when he heard the familiar voice.  
  
“Well how do you like that? A Longshanks and a Littleshanks.”  
  
Bertolt turned and smiled at Ymir, who was dressed in a sleek little black dress and, like him, sported a toddler on one hip. “Littleshanks?” he asked. “I thought it was Peewee.”  
  
Ymir smirked. “That was before I got a good look at father and son side-by-side. Just look at that sweet little face! The kid is the spitting image of you, Bertl.”  
  
“Thanks,” said Bertolt, blushing. It gave him such pride to be compared to Gus. “The same goes for you and yours, you know. Lacie is a sweetheart.” This was his first time meeting Lacie Harley Reiss in person, a little girl as pretty as a doll, with honey blond hair and fawn brown eyes and a spray of cinnamon freckles across her nose—they hadn’t truly been inherited from Ymir, but that didn’t matter.  
  
“Say hi to Gus, Lacie,” Ymir told her daughter.  
  
“Hi, Gus,” said Lacie, grinning as she waved a small hand. Gus buried his face in Bertolt’s jacket, which caused mother and daughter to both burst out laughing. “Mommy, he shy.”  
  
Ymir pressed a smooch to the girl’s forehead. “Who knows. One day you two might be best friends.”  
  
This made Lacie so happy that she stretched out her arms towards Gus to try and give him a hug. “Gus my best fren!”  
  
Gus clung to Bertolt like a baby monkey.  
  
“You know, we’re already thinking about having another,” said Ymir. “But with Tori starting filming on the second part of that trilogy this summer, I’ll be carrying this one.” She let out a single bark of laughter. “Can you picture it, Longshanks? Me prego?”  
  
“It’s a stretch,” he admitted. Then again, so was the idea of Annie pregnant, but she had been—he’d seen the ridiculously cute photographs. “I bet you’ll make it look easy, Ymir.”  
  
“Ha! You know I will. All we need now is to find a male donor who resembles Tori.” As she said this, something caught her attention and her eyes drifted away. Following her gaze, Bertolt saw that she’d just noticed Armin among the guests. Promptly, she returned her focus to Bertolt and said, “You know what, I just remembered I have some business to take care of. But you know I’m not done with you yet.”  
  
Bertolt sighed, but not without affection. “I know.”  
  
As Ymir started to walk away, she called back to him over her shoulder. “Congratulations on the new wife. And the new husband. And the book. Don’t forget the dedication.”  
  
In his head, he thanked her and wished her luck. Strange as she was, Ymir was his friend.  
  
Without a doubt, the biggest stir was caused by the presence of film star Krista Lenz, who graciously signed autographs for all who asked and must have been grateful for the low guest count. Once the initial star-shock had worn off, however, she had as much fun as everyone else. Bertolt watched from a distance as Ymir handed Lacie off to Historia before stalking after Armin, and Marco strolled up to the movie star mom and started chatting with her as if they were already good friends.  
  
On all sides, friendships were cropping up: Connie appeared to be describing some movie or anime to Eren and Reiner because he kept gesticulating wildly and striking tough guy poses that made the other two laugh. Annie was talking to Mikasa, presumably about martial arts, but it was possible they had other things in common. Sasha was showing Hitch how many crab puffs she could fit in her mouth as Marlo looked on reproachfully. Ma chatted with Ms. Leonhart, the first time Bertolt had ever seen her with a friend, and she looked happier than she’d ever been. On the periphery of the scene, the B &B’s proprietor Mr. Smith lurked, but not in a creepy way—they had invited him to join the celebration. At his side was a short, squinty man who Bertolt recognized as the head of the housekeeping staff (or possibly the housekeeping staff in its one-man entirety) though his named remained a mystery.  
  
Looking at all of these warm, friendly faces Bertolt’s heart felt so full it was overflowing. But in the most wonderful way.  
  
For years his world had been tiny and cramped and wretched, only big enough for himself. Then Annie and Reiner had come and stretched the walls a little bigger and given him a whole new universe of three people. They stuck with him through so many hells, followed him all over the country just so he wouldn’t ever be alone again. As they moved from place to place, he’d thought it was just the three of them fighting to survive, but now he realized that his world had been expanding by degrees with each new place, each new friend. And the proof was all around him.  
  
There was no longer anybody in his life who hurt him intentionally or made him feel worthless. He had nothing to fear. Bertolt had spent so much of his life running and hiding—in crawlspaces, in social isolation, in the poisonous refuge of alcohol—but now, at last, he felt safe and loved.  
  
  
  
At the end of the day, after the guests had gone off to do their own things with their own time and the folding chairs had been folded up and all the tables cleared, Bertolt and Annie and Reiner (with sleepy, frosting-smudged Gus in tow) retired to the honeymoon suite. They were all too tired to be bothered with showering or even changing out of their wedding clothes, so Bertolt and Reiner stripped down to their pants and Annie to her slip, and since Gus was practically asleep already they just left him as he was. The four of them fit perfectly in a king-sized bed—Bertolt and Reiner face-to-face, ankles laced together, Annie and Gus nestled in the middle.  
  
It wasn’t very late, but this had been a big day and they fell asleep knowing there would still be plenty of forever left tomorrow.

 

Thank you for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> Did I do okay? I know this series has its flaws—early parts are too short while part 7 is way too long, too many references to music/movies/books, and ever increasing abuse of the em-dash—but I am so grateful to everyone who looked past those things and found something worthwhile in reading this long series. 
> 
> This being the very end of my longest fanfic project to date, I am filled with both accomplishment and loss. And also that unique feeling that inevitably comes with writing an alternate universe: Oh wow, this has nothing to do with Attack on Titan anymore. But I hope it was enjoyable for everyone who took the time to read it. Even though it is very detached from the canon material it definitely came from a place of love for the series and characters, especially the Titan Trio. I tried to put in a lot of nods to canon to show this, but still it is a very different world.
> 
> Naturally, I worry about what readers will think of this ending. My biggest concerns have been that it will be seen as too unrealistically sweet and happy, that the OT3 ending will satisfy fans of neither pairing, and that readers will hate Gus (because he is an OC and a baby and kind of disgustingly cute). 
> 
> When I first conceived of the vague idea of this story, it did not have a happy ending at all—Reiner was dead, Bertolt was in a mental hospital, and Annie was raising her child (a girl) alone. But this was before the plot had come together and it was very quickly scrapped. After I decided to actually write a runaways story, I outlined it and had an ending in mind rather similar to the one you just read, only it was strictly BertAnnie, with Reiner having pulled an "I want my beloved to be happy." But as soon as I wrote the first installment from little Reiner's point of view I knew I wanted his love to be returned, too. And why not? Bertolt has enough love in him for two. 
> 
> So it has been set to end with an OT3 for a long time. To be honest, I've never written an unhappy ending and am not sure if it would suit me. I need the sugary catharsis. And if I want a story with a realistic ending, there is always my life. 
> 
> Gus has been part of the plan for a long time, too. I love giving my OTP/3s babies. I know it is not everybody's cup of tea, but for me it is. Always has been. Pregnancy and baby stories are my guilty pleasure and I don't even want kids in real life. Please do not hate Gus. He makes his parents very happy and he is very dear to his creator (that is, me).
> 
> If anyone is curious, Marco was indeed Historia and Ymir's donor and they treat him as a family friend, even encouraging Lacie to call him Unkie Marco. Ymir will talk Armin into being donor #2 and henceforth Armin and Marco will jokingly refer to each other as "sperm-donors-in-law." Lacie and Gus will become best friends and Bertolt will write more books and have some success, though not as much as Ymir.
> 
> Infinity thanks to everyone who read the whole thing, to the kudo-givers and commenters and all who supported me. And so much love to those of you who have listened to my concerns on tumblr and offered your encouragement and advice. I won't name names because you know who you are.
> 
> All the titles for the works in this series come from the L.A. based street artist Morley. He has a book out now that I highly recommend. And definitely check out his website.
> 
> And lastly, I thank tumblr user ToastyHat (who Homestucks might know as the very talented artist behind the Mambostuck music video) for doing such a lovely job of inking and coloring the commemorative family portrait I drew. She succeeded in making my mediocre pencil drawing actually look pretty darn good, I think. It has been the background on my phone for a long time now and I am happy that I finally get to share it with everyone. Of course, if you dislike the OT3+Gus ending, you probably aren't that impressed.
> 
> Advice for becoming a better writer is welcome! Visit me on tumblr!


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